2w ago

KDE devs have been quietly working on Plasma Keyboard, a new on-screen keyboard for desktop and mobile part of the “We Care About Your Input” KDE Goals initiative. Although not ready for texting yet,

KDE devs have been quietly working on Plasma Keyboard, a new on-screen keyboard for desktop and mobile part of the “We Care About Your Input” KDE Goals initiative. Although not ready for texting yet, it has been making progress. Hopefully it'll be in a screen near you soon. Join the effort!

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-keyboard

kde #plasma #mobile #osk #accessibility #keyboard

@kde@lemmy.kde.social

Linux Furs @pawb.social

Southern Wolf @pawb.social

2w ago

40 comments

This will be great for Steam Deck.
- The deck already has a rather good keyboard experience, not sure what this changes
  
  @Hexarei @tonytins
  steam deck's keyboard is themeable! maybe Plasma themes will work?? 🤞
  
  Still, it's nice to have a native option.
- This will be great for Steam Deck.
  Won't help Steam Deck if Valve ends up stripping out this keyboard the same way they disabled Maliit.
  
  tbf the steam keyboard is great, and is really well suited to the steam deck's touchpads

@kde@floss.social @kde@lemmy.kde.social That's great! Thank you, KDE team! I need this on my laptop that can transform into a tablet and back in runtime.

The Gnome OSK is actually so terrible.
- But it works.
  Wanted to install OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE as desktop on my Steam Deck without getting a keyboard. Had to use the Gnome Live image because it's the only one with a working keyboard.
- The Gnome ~~OSK~~ is actually so terrible.
  There I fixed it. /s
- Because it's an OSK, not a touch screen keyboard.
  Hopefully someone spends some time developing a proper touch keyboard on GNOME.
  
  Ehh, it has integrated touch gesture support (at least on fedora) so I feel like it's kind of both.
  It's really not THAT bad. The fact that the text prediction at the top changes the position of the keyboard and can't be disabled drives me nuts.
  FWIW I use Fedora + Gnome on a touch screen only tablet and it all works well enough.

@kde@floss.social @kde@lemmy.kde.social
can you rebuild swype, the only phone keyboard that ever worked worth a damn?
- can you rebuild swype
  It's a skin for Qt Virtual Keyboard.
- This reply was swiped on Futo keyboard.
  
  Source-available, in MY floss operating system?
  It's less likely than you think!

Idk why all on screen keyboard come without tab key in plasma. I have a laptop while in a tablet mode I can't use terminal at all because there's no tab key.

It's just a Plasma skin for Qt Virtual Keyboard. Not that this is bad but KDE developers are co-maintainers of Maliit and ended up contributing very little.

@kde@floss.social @kde@lemmy.kde.social
thanks!
I wouldnt mind funding a great onscreen-keyboard, especially with special keys that make it actually usable (alt, ctrl, shift etc.).

As long as it has modifier and F keys, accepts mouse input and is manually toggleable I'm happy. Bonus points if I can configure it to show those and number keys per default.

This is a great initiative! I tried plasma on a tablet like device a while ago and the keyboard was one of the main issues holding it back.

Edit: issue made and fixed https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-keyboard/-/issues/12
Looks like I need kde-gitlab account fpr making issues.
I couldn't compile it,
cmake ..

-- The C compiler identification is GNU 15.1.1 -- The CXX compiler identification is GNU 15.1.1 -- Detecting C compiler ABI info -- Detecting C compiler ABI info - done -- Check for working C compiler: /usr/bin/cc - skipped -- Detecting C compile features -- Detecting C compile features - done -- Detecting CXX compiler ABI info -- Detecting CXX compiler ABI info - done -- Check for working CXX compiler: /usr/bin/c++ - skipped -- Detecting CXX compile features -- Detecting CXX compile features - done CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:8 (find_package): By not providing "FindECM.cmake" in CMAKE_MODULE_PATH this project has asked CMake to find a package configuration file provided by "ECM", but CMake did not find one. Could not find a package configuration file provided by "ECM" (requested version 6.0.0) with any of the following names: ECMConfig.cmake ecm-config.cmake Add the installation prefix of "ECM" to CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH or set "ECM_DIR" to a directory containing one of the above files. If "ECM" provides a separate development package or SDK, be sure it has been installed. -- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
- In the future, you can generally solve these sorts of build errors by just installing the development package for whatever library is missing. On Debian-based systems, that would be something along the lines of sudo apt install libecm<tab><tab> see what appears, choose one which looks reasonable with -dev suffix
  
  Thank you.
  In this case installing ecm-tools (I use arch) didn't fix it. That was the first thing I tried before making an issue.
  It needed extra packages for cmake (refer to the issue for details)

Will it work on X? xd

Will it work well with existed IME like Fcitx5? Or I can choose only one of them?
I see Qt Virtual Keyboard has their own InputMethod implementations, but I think it's not a good idea to re-invent a new IME when there is no obvious advantage, because InputMethod is not a simple thing in some languages like Chinese and Japanese.
For example, libime, the core algorithm library of fcitx5-chinese-addons uses 47k SLOC to implement a good pinyin input method algorithm, even not count the Trigram language model, which is around 30MiB.
As a comparison, the pinyin algorithm of Qt Virtual Keyboard (it seems come from deprecated AOSP's PinyinIME) uses only 8k SLOC. And PinyinIME was give up by AOSP since 2014, it never updates since that time (and no algorithm update since 2009). At 2018, Qt pull it into Qt Virtual Keyboard and never do actual algorithm optimization. So it has fallen away from the time.

Why work on something quietly when you can work on it loudly?

Let's hope it works a bit better with the floating plasma dock than Maliit. Having some weird graphical issues with my current setup.

"we care about your input" is 180 from gnome's "you're an idiot, and we know what's best for you". I think kde did this on purpose 😂. That's why I never use anything else.
- It's not a competition, and insulting developers who donate their time to open-source is counterproductive.
  Use whatever you wish.

@kde@floss.social @kde@lemmy.kde.social hmm... how to resolve this error?

    
QT\_IM\_MODULES=qtvirutalkeyboard ./bin/plasma-keyboard   
Failed to initialize input panel-shell integration, possibly because compositor does not support the layer-shell protocol  
ASSERT failure in Q\_UNREACHABLE(): "Q\_UNREACHABLE was reached", file /home/pak0stpc/Projects/plasma-keyboard/src/main.cpp, line 292  
Aborted (core dumped) QT\_IM\_MODULES=qtvirutalkeyboard ./bin/plasma-keyboard

I would like to give it a shot on my system