What you guys need is proper documentation, I looked through the Plasma wiki, Arch wiki, etc, only found stuff regarding maliit-keyboard. Took a good few days after getting moved in to my new KDE install to even find this thread. I would volunteer to write the technical docs if I actually knew how to configure this thing, but idk if I have push request rights to the various mediawiki instances and I don’t actually know how this software works too well…
Bear in mind we this project is VERY young, but, if you are serious about helping to contribute, we would be very grateful. Here’s how to get started:
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Do you guys have any cursory documentation on this or is it just source code right now? I see scant resources on how to manually configure this thing even though it seems you can change the height with configuration options
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I’m not sure if this a plasma keyboard specific issue or a more general plasma limitation, but I’m having trouble getting the plasma virtual keyboard to show up at all if I want to also be able to type in Japanese (with a normal physical keyboard)
I’m using KDE Plasma 6.5.4-1 on a PineTab-2 [wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineTab2] running Arch and have used Mallit and Plasma Keyboard, though I have not seen much difference between them. I usually use the OSK when the tablet is in a landscape layout (sideways).
As a user with low vision, I find it difficult to have the keyboard take up a large portion of the screen; I thought the default was 50% but I see from this KDE Discuss thread and the videos shared above that it is possible to change this to a lower percentage. I will try that. The reason for this difficulty is especially acute in Konsole because I use a large font size and have my UI Scaling turned up. The menus at the top of Konsole and a OSK which consumes 30-50% of the lower portion of the screen leaves me with 2-3 lines of readable text in the terminal window itself.
What I would love to see is a non-QWERTY layout which uses maybe two rows of keys for A-Z and 0-9 with maybe a few common characters, such as in the set [,.-:;’”!?] for example. Additional characters should be available on multiple separate pages. I have no love for QWERTY when using an OSK because I do not touch-type on the screen, rather use one finger at a time. IMHO the keys should be large enough to tap and to read, and no bigger than that.
But the main thing I find very difficult and have not been able to locate is any way to input Control key with a character, such as ^I (tab), ^J (CR), ^C (SIGTERM) etc. Having no way to use CTRL- sequences within Konsole is extremely difficult. I’ve seen these available as small toggle buttons in the Gnome-based “squeekboard”, for reference. It also gives extra pages with other special physical keyboard characters/sequences such as Page Up/Down, Insert, Delete, Home, End, Print Screen, arrow keys etc. These are extremely helpful within a terminal window; Especially “^C”! 
Alt and Meta/Super would also be extremely helpful.
I’d also like to be able to increase the size of the displayed characters on each key and decrease the associated margins. Due to the nature of my visual disability I do not find it necessary to have very large margins above, below, and beside letters, but would prefer large displayed characters and small margins. This would also assist with the vertical spacing mentioned above.
Thanks so much for this post and especially for the accessibility improvements KDE has made over the years. UI Scale is very helpful, though when everything is bigger including the top menu and the OSK, the usable portion of each window can be exceedingly tiny.
My partner and I made a PoC with some of the changes I suggested. I invented a brand new layout I’m calling “THC” for now. I looked at images of QWERTY and of Dvorak layouts, as well as frequency of English characters, and this is what I came up with. My partner did the coding and made the following changes at my request:
- Reduce 30% vertical chew-up down to only 15%
- Remove the margins to the sides of the OSK due to the 1/6 rule
- Increase font size of keycap characters, while reducing their margin/padding
I’m still just testing this, but it looks like a much better solution to me than the default configuration.
These changes were implemented by editing:
- create /usr/share/plasma/keyboard/layouts/en_GB/mail.qml to implement the brand new layout
- modify /usr/lib/qt6/qml/QtQuick/VirtualKeyboard/Styles/Breeze/style.qml for the other design and spacing changes
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/usr/share/plasma/keyboard/layouts/en_GB/mail.qml
This was a typo (made on a physical QWERTY keyboard haha!)
The actual filename should be “main.qml” not “mail.qml”
Thanks for you report, we are aware of this issue but do note that it happens due to Libreoffice’s lack of support for Wayland’s text-input protocols. You need to report it to them.
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Thanks for yout feedback, we have merge requests for physical keyboard emulation (ctrl, meta, etc…) and the non full-width layout. Hopefully they’ll come in future versions. We have an issue for configuring fonts.
The non-qwerty layout seems to be very specific, but sure if it works for everyone?
Appreciate the reply thanks, I have filed a bug report with them 
Could you send me the link please so I can track it?
For reference here is a screenshot of squeekboard from Phosh on the page showing special “physical” keys including F1-F12 and arrow keys. The small top row including CTRL and Alt are shown on all other pages as well (alphabetic page, number and non-alphanumeric characters such as ,.:;[]()<>{}) so that they are always available.
Regarding the new layout I created, I’m not sure I understand “but sure if it works for everyone?” because I just invented this in the last week; it has never existed before. The purpose of this is to collapse all alphabetic keys for English down to just two rows, for use in a landscape (horizontal) screen orientation, in order to free up screen space for application display.
QWERTY was invented in the 1870s for a mechanical typewriter, not for onscreen keyboards used with touch or D-pad interfaces (i.e. gaming consoles and so-called “smart” TVs). While it has gained popularity and therefore familiarity among English users, it is impractical for a landscape-oriented screen IMHO, especially if it consumes 4 rows (with 1-0) of vertical height. I don’t mind it so much when the screen is in portrait (vertical) orientation.
An interface within KDE System Settings to configure the 30% value as well the 1:6 aspect ratio value are critical additions in my opinion.
Thanks.
Sure, here it is by number (I don’t appear to have privileges for DM or links).
171596
It appears to be touch input in general (so not really specific to the keyboard module at all) and file menus, buttons and file name text entry fields work fine it’s just the actual editing window that malfunctions.
How can i use the virtual keyboard with mouse is there any shortcut to open it or is it mandatory to have a touchscreen
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I’d love to test this on my Acer Switch 5 running MX Linux with KDE-plasma and plasma-mobile. No virtual keyboard did even show up so far.
However, how can I get that package? I can’t find anything.
It doesn’t work for me
- I cannot typ äëïöü áéíóú \
- I cannot use Ctrl+Shift+u + hexcode to enter Unicode
In other words: useless for me.
Is there any status on cursor motion, tab keys, etc.? I’d like to use Emacs in tablet mode on occasion. It’s difficult to offer assistance without even knowing the current state of things.
I’m finally trying KDE again after decades of waiting for different workspaces on different screens. I really, really hope this isn’t going to be in a similar situation.