Is there an on-screen keyboard available that work with a mouse?
Should be an option like the superior Onboard on X11 so I can control my screen(s) from afar by mouse.
Really sad there seems nothing available for Wayland. Maliit seems to be for touch screens since it never pops up here.
I just need a simple widget or so.
It works with a mouse for me, but I do have to tap a text input area first, as expected.
I don’t think there is a way yet to manually invoke the OSK at the moment, though I could be wrong.
Thanks. That initial finger tap is not reproducible here. Plus you can’t use it on non-text fields, say for shortcuts.
I’d love to emulate X11 Onboard somehow. That possible?
This looks like this bug report: 439911 – Allow showing the OSK when the active application does not support text-input-v2 or v3
It is set as “resolved” though I do not understand the process that was supposedly implemented to force the onscreen keyboard.
It’s really bugging me that this is still an issue apparently without any solution. I found NO working on-screen keyboard. I use CoreKeyboard on the SteamDeck and it works great, but it apparently only works in KDE Plasma 5.
Maliit just doesn’t open. The tray button just shows “activated”/“deactivated”, but it never opens the actually keyboard which is very annoying.
Is there any solution? Any way to just add a button to the icon tray to toggle the on-screen keyboard?
I just need an on-screen keyboard occasionally when computing from the couch …
Nope!
In fact they had an entire fundraising scheme a few months back about “supporting good people” and then just failed to include anything to do with accessibility including an osk solution.
There have been numerous posts about how mallit is a detriment to this entire situation and they keep insisting that “oh its being worked on… but volunteers” except its getting to the point where distros are insisting upon using wayland which I would be in full support for if KDE could get its act together and actually address this issue like GNOME has.
which is extra sad because gnome does things like hold up development with complaints about window decorations so if you’re lagging behind them then something really odd is going on.
I think you should be a bit more better informed before posting somthing this damning. Infact, there is already a project underway to create a virtual keyboard for Plasma by KDE: Plasma Keyboard
Thank you, this looks promising. i’ll check that out.
In my first attempt CMAKE threw errors because apparently there’s no C compiler installed, or something like that.
Sry, although I’m a professional software engineer, I always feel very dumb and dim-witted when it comes to Linux problems. 
I don’t like compiling things myself, because I’m sure I’m going to break things, because I’m a noob.
The applet currently only toggles off and Touch+Tablet. If you want it to show with the mouse you need to add KWIN_IM_SHOW_ALWAYS=1 to kwin’s environment variables.
Its clearly not ideal. The current Idea is to make the applet be 3 states instead. Off/Touch+Tablet/Everything. Would something like that work for you?
As for Plasma Keyboard: (it works the same way, still needs the Env variable).
It is currently more of a proof of concept not yet fully usable for regular users.
Wow awesome, thank you!
I added a file kwin_env.sh in ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/:
#!/bin/sh
export KWIN_IM_SHOW_ALWAYS=1
It seems to be working perfectly now!