This is too great not to share. Wayland devs hate this trick! I’ll copy what I did from the bug report.
As a workaround you can use https://github.com/Supreeeme/extest to make Onboard work. Compile it as a 64 bit library and launch onboard with
env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libextest.so onboardIf you want to use it with KDE you can add
X-KDE-Wayland-VirtualKeyboard=trueto its desktop-file.
I used kwin rules to get rid of window decorations and have it always on top without stealing focus. If someone knows how to make all other windows smaller when it’s active that would be great.
Only problem remaining is that sometimes the keys get stuck on touch input. At least on my Steam Deck on OpenSUSE.
Edit: Just noticed that it doesn’t work on KDE’s lock screen. Hopefully I can find a workaround for that as well.
Edit 2: Was easier than I thought. Just select Maliit as a virtual keyboard and start Onboard manually. If you tap with your finger in a text field Maliit will come up. When you click in a text field Onboard will open. But Maliit also works on the lock screen.
You got me excited there for a minute! Though I don’t really want workarounds (they are the only way and therefore a necessity / automatically good, but they are not the real thing), I want virtual keyboards with actual native Wayland support, please :(
Squeekboard is where it’s at. By far my favorite onscreen keyboard for Linux and mainly because you can easily create your own layouts using .yaml files. I’m tired of virtual keyboards that omit keys needed for development and terminal use or shove them off to separate tabs. My custom Squeekboard layout fits my needs exactly and I’m pretty fast at typing on it (typing this on it now). I wish it were usable outside of Phosh, though tbf I haven’t tried. Between GNOME Mobile, KDE Plasma Mobile, and Phosh (Squeekboard), I choose Phosh primarily because of how much I like Squeekboard.
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Yay a Git repo without screenshots
Maliit has explicit wayland support and has a kcm
The problems with Maliit are that it lacks special keys like Ctrl, Alt, Tab, Esq, F1-F12, etc. And you cannot invoke it by yourself to type in XWayland applications or others which don’t pull up the keyboard by themselves.
The Gnome keyboard seems to be better in that regard but I couldn’t even find its name to pull it up outside of Gnome.
And you cannot invoke it by yourself to type in XWayland applications
Yes you can
How?
I mean, I got a different solution by now, but would be nice to know for the future.
When you have a Xwayland app focused, the Plasma panel will have an upward facing arrow in the system tray. If you tap it, the virtual keyboard will pop up
Not on Plasma Desktop. Maybe on Mobile. But I was not able to find out how to get it to Desktop.
I am talking about the desktop. Mobile doesn’t have a system tray.
Cool. They didnt ask for a fully-featured keyboard, they asked for a wayland-compatible onscreen keyboard.
In that case please state which Wayland support it has. That’s the beauty of standards, there are so many to choose from. And in the case of Wayland keyboards you have to know which one the keyboard and which the compositor supports, making it extra easy for the user.
I’m not even sure if any of the 3? 4? Wayland protocols allow for a fully featured osk. So this actually feels like the best outcome.
That sounds great!
What version of Plasma does it require, though?
And how is it able to inject key events with extest? Does it use some wayland feature to get permission to do so, or does it do some kind of workaround like the uinput trick?
I tested it on Plasma 6. If I interpret the extest Readme correctly it uses the uinput trick. So I guess that it works with older versions as well. Maybe without the plasma integration.
Oh. Does that mean that I need to open up the permissions of /dev/uinput for this to work?
Look at the extest readme, everything is there.
Sorry, didn’t realize that the link is to extest’s repo.
It seems that this actually undoes wayland’s protection against any program inserting fake input events, and it does not only allow onboard to do so.
I thought that it was already possible with onboard, with selecting uinput instead of xtest in the settings. Never tried though, because I didn’t want to undo that security measure.
I’ll have to try the uinput setting. Maybe the workaround isn’t needed after all. Or at least it doesn’t have to be so convoluted.
But yeah, it’s really just a dirty placeholder until we can get a proper solution in the next 50 years or so.
Edit: ignore comment, didn’t realise it was about the Deck initially!
