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maliit / keyboard

Maliit Keyboard, a free software virtual keyboard for Linux
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Usability: add a (small) button to hide the keyboard #222

Open ell1e opened 4 months ago

ell1e commented 4 months ago

In my experience on some devices, e.g. Linux tablets like the PineTab or the Valve Steam Deck, it might be both common to have a hardware keyboard attached and to also sometimes not have one nearby meaning an on-screen keyboard needs to be constantly available to not get trapped on the lock screen. Therefore, it would make sense to enable the on-screen keyboard on these devices by default.

However, then doing that makes it paramount that it's obvious how to get it out of the way to not frustrate new users that may have a usb keyboard attached. While the downward swipe gesture is nice, most on-screen keyboards (including the Valve Steam Deck's SteamOS keyboard) have a dedicated button for this. Consequently, when first opening Maliit I found myself stuck with it open which was rather frustrating before I found out about the swipe gesture on Google, which wasn't a great first experience.

Therefore, I'm suggesting:

  1. that a visible hide button is added. It doesn't need to be big and can be kinda finicky to press, but it'll be better than nothing for those users who don't immediately discover the swipe gesture.

  2. The keyboard should maybe also auto-hide when a key press from an actual hardware keyboard attached comes in. I could be remembering this wrongly, but I think this is also how the GNOME Shell keyboard behaves. I assume this might need cooperation with kwin_wayland somehow, so I hope this is feasible, but it would help a lot with users not being too frustrated when they just want to ignore it and type with something external.

hubick commented 4 months ago

Relevant? https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2780

ell1e commented 4 months ago

Great find, that looks relevant! They don't seem to mention though if one tap to close might also be considered on top of one tap to open, I'm not quite sure. For what it's worth, I think Valve placed the close button onto the keyboard itself, while Phosh has a separate toggle in the bottom bar.