Onscreen keyboard: how to improve the experience

By default, GNOME Shell has a pretty terrible onscreen keyboard and other DE's might not have a built-in one per se. Luckily, you can easily improve the experience so that it becomes perfectly useable. And by perfectly I really mean perfectly.

Using your favorite package manager or the terminal, install onboard

After installation, open up the Onboard Settings app as well Onboard itself. Now of course, this is a bit of a personal preference for most of the settings, but what I find to work awesome and beautiful as a setup is setting the following things:

General tab: -Check Auto-show when editing text

Window tab: -Check Dock to screen edge and then hit the Settings button; choose Bottom as the location and check the other 3 things as well -After that, resize the keyboard to your likings by mouse (or using the touch screen, but it's a bit tricky like that) just like you would resize an app window. When done, go to the Resize Protection tab and set Frame resize handles: to None to prevent accidentally resizing the keyboard when near an edge. You can always set it back if you do need to resize the keyboard.

Layout tab: -Depends on how many keys you want, but I personally like the Compact layout the best. You can play around with this to see what you like.

Theme tab: -Depends on what theme you like, but IMHO the best looking theme and also most modern looking theme is Blackboard. -Whatever theme you choose, hit the Customize theme button and play around. I personally set it to: Keyboard tab: Color scheme: Charcoal, Gradient ba:ckground: 0, Light direction angle: -7. Keys tab: Style: Flat, Roundness: 0, Size: 96, Border width: 36 Label tab: Font: Prelude (though you need to install that font; on a pure GNOME Shell desktop w/o installing fonts, Cantarell would integrate the best), Super key: Super, check Independent size.

Keyboard tab: -I personally check Show label pop-ups, but that's subject to personal preference. You can also enable key sounds if you want to.

Typing Assistance tab: -Check Show suggestions and check all the sub checkboxes under Options as well. -Also, if you don't like auto-capitalizing, disable that on the Auto-correction tab.

Do note that you need to launch Onboard every time you decide to switch go touch only but that's a matter of a few clicks, really. Enjoy! :)

Vistaus / surface3-arch-antergoslinux

Onscreen keyboard: how to improve the experience #5