UITextInput improvements

[migueldeicaza]

Currently, the UITextInput implementation is using an out-of-band Character buffer, plus positions and ranges that are based on indexes into this out-of-band buffer.

This works for dictation, and input methods and I finally got it to work.

That said, it has a few problems:

• It does not do a "live" preview of the input with foreign inputs (like Chinese showing the intermediate results of the guesses).
• Dictation only works when the dictation is complete, and is not live.
• Holding the spacebar does not do much in terms of moving the cursor

How other terminals work

	Shelly	iSSH	Termius	Secure Term	Shell Fish	LibTerm
Input Method	Busted, enters both the initial sequence and additional ones	Filters out Chinese	Works sometimes, and shows selection during marking, but struggled with vi and cat	Works	Works	Works+shows selection during marking
Dictation	Live, works	Does not work	Live, works	Live, works	Works, but is buggy (sends text, then cursor backs to the origin, makes it useless)	Works
SpaceMove.	no-op	no-op	Tracks+Funky	no-op	Tracks+Funky	Goes through the motions, but does not do anything.

Tracks+Funky in SpaceMove means that the application does track the cursor with the space bar, and then attempts to send enough cursor key movements to the target to track the location. But also means that in the wrong context (say, "cat"), it just sends the sequences and just looks odd.

[Lakr233]

Have you find any solution on Chinese input? It doesn’t work and the insertText isn’t getting called. :( Having no idea where to follow up next…

[migueldeicaza]

Hello!

Can you describe what you are trying to do, and how it fails?

I would need to know what keyboard you are using, how you are activating it, and which keystrokes you are using, so I can reproduce locally.

It works as far as I can tell with the main branch

[Lakr233]

Let me answer the question first.

• what you are trying to do

I am trying to fix an issue that the terminalView insertText won't get called when typing with Chinese keyboard.

• how it fails?

No respond or future action created.

• what keyboard you are using

The system one with Chinese Pinyin Input Method.

• how you are activating it

.onAppear {
    terminal.terminalView.becomeFirstResponder()
}

which keystrokes

I don't get it.......... :(

---

For some more detail, I can provide you a demo project that I am currently using. Let me explain a little bit more.

Changes:

• We changed the define marco so we can use it under tvOS, just reversed if macOS to iOS || tvOS.
• Other sources are identical to the main branch.

Terminal Setup Block:

terminalView.backgroundColor = .clear
terminalView.isOpaque = true
terminalView.backgroundColor = UIColor.clear
terminalView.nativeBackgroundColor = UIColor.clear

• It is because, if we set the background, Chinese character will be clipped. This issue also exists in your demo project SwiftTermApp. Simply type curl https://www.baidu.com, you will notice those Chinese clipped with only half left displayed.

Demo Project Here

[migueldeicaza]

Interesting finding: this happens with the SwiftUI wrapper, but not with the view without SwiftUI.

If you open the SwiftTerm sample project for iOS (iOSTerminal), and configure the host in UIKitSshTerminal.View and add manually the password there, you can see that the Chinese text input works.

But when I tried it on my own app, that wraps the SwiftTerm into a SwiftUI, the auxiliary keyboard is not shown either.

This is what SwiftTerm shows:

Sadly, this is what SwiftTermApp (my SwiftUI-based app that uses the exact same code) shows. In this case, I have already entered a few keys, and the keyboard is never shown:

So at this point, I suspect something is going on with SwiftUI. Reveal shows that the keyboard is being activated on the regular version, and the size of the keyboard is larger:

While on the SwiftUI version, the keyboard starts up smaller, and does not get the region with the additional data:

(Ignore the yellow color, that is just a different style that I am using there).

[migueldeicaza]

I have implemented manual support for the cursor tracking, so this works, but it is not as good as it could be, because the data that I get is a proxy to the geometry for the caret that I get - which is not necessarily what we want on a terminal app. So a potential fix is to use a timer when we get close to the boundary to trigger a repeat operation - but I have not figured out how to get the boundary information