The Unfettered Keyboard is an on-screen keyboard for Linux mobile.

User Interfaces (UIs)

Phosh

Phosh has a D-Bus API for showing the keyboard without focusing on a text box. The keyboard can be shown by making a long press on the bottom of the screen. The API tells the keyboard to activate while making text-emitting keys fall back to emitting key presses.

Phoc, the compositor, does not implement all Wayland text input protocols. Most Qt applications require manually activating the keyboard and can only accept keys supported by xkbcommon (e.g. no "‹", "›", "₹", "₽", "₴", "₿", or "₱").

Build target

The ufkbd-gnome build target is for Phosh.

Switching keyboards

The keyboard program is specified in the Exec= line of /usr/share/applications/sm.puri.OSK0.desktop. Change it to the absolute path of your keyboard.

Plasma Mobile

Plasma Mobile has no mechanism to show or hide the keyboard without a text field.

Kwin does not implement the Wayland virtual keyboard protocol. Most applications can only accept text and do not handle the key events that an input method can emit (i.e. no Ctrl or Alt modifiers, no Enter key, no Escape key, Tab only works with Fn, no arrow keys).

Build target

The ufkbd-wl build target is for Plasma Mobile.

Switching keyboards

In your $PATH (usually includes /usr/local/bin), Plasma Mobile looks for maliit-keyboard. You can symlink it to your desired keyboard.

Alternatively, you could edit the startplasmamobile script and replace maliit-keyboard with your desired on-screen keyboard, but this may require adding support for your keyboard to KDE.

SXMO (Wayland)

SXMO shows and hides the on-screen keyboard by running and terminating it. The on-screen keyboard does not handle visibility.

Build target

The ufkbd-sxmo build target is for SXMO.

Switching keyboards

Set the $KEYBOARD environment variable to your desired keyboard.

Other

Most Wayland compositors have no mechanism to show or hide the keyboard without a text field.

Build target

The ufkbd-wl build target is for most compatible Wayland compositors.

Switching keyboards

Configure your desired keyboard to run on startup. This may mean a desktop file in ~/.config/autostart.

Installation

This program has the following build dependencies:

• libexpat (Alpine package: expat-dev), the fast streaming XML parser written in C99 with >90% test coverage.
• libclang (Alpine package: clang-libclang), a compiler front-end for the C family of languages (C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++).

You can install it with:

$ cargo install --bin <target>

Layouts are essential and not installed by cargo. They are installed manually:

$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/unfettered-keyboard/layouts
$ curl -OL https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard/raw/1.29.1/srcs/layouts/latn_qwerty_us.xml
$ sudo mv latn_qwerty_us.xml /usr/share/unfettered-keyboard/layouts
$ curl -OL https://github.com/Julow/Unexpected-Keyboard/raw/1.29.1/res/xml/bottom_row.xml
$ sudo mv bottom_row.xml /usr/share/unfettered-keyboard/layouts

Configuration

This keyboard is configured with YAML.

Configuration example:

%YAML 1.2
---
layout: latn_qwerty_us.xml

longpress_ms: 600
repeat_ms: 25

wayland:
  height: 185