Vboard: An alternative onscreen keyboard for Plasma (Wayland compatible and supports modifier keys)

Tips and Tricks
1

Plasma Keyboard doesn’t support modifier keys. And it is nearly impossible to use GNU/Linux on a touchscreen tablet (without keyboard), as you need these keys for terminal commands (also to select multiple things, or quickly copy/paste, or for terminal commands). There are tons of posts on this site about a usable on-screen-keyboard, but I could not find any solution.

vboard_plasma
vboard_plasma1920×1080 188 KB

I came across the abandoned vboard project, that looked promising.

I forked it, and added Plasma 6.6 compatibility, a tray icon, and many new features. I plan to maintain this for the foreseeable future.

Homepage: vboard | Virtual Keyboard for GNU/Linux Wayland Desktops

For Debian based distributions, a prebuilt .deb package is available on GitHub releases: Install it and reboot.

For Arch, I plan to publish this to AUR. But for now, you can install manually

yay -S vboard

Then, reboot.

For other distributions you can manually install from source: GitHub - archisman-panigrahi/vboard: Wayland compatible virtual keyboard with modifier keys for GNU/Linux · GitHub

Vboard uses uinput to send keystrokes, and it is also compatible with GNOME

Of course, this is not an ideal solution. Looking forward to Plasma Keyboard gaining modifier keys for a better native experience. Without it, I had been having real trouble using Plasma on my tablet, whereas Plasma on my desktop has been wonderful.

3 Likes
Plasma 6 and Wayland no on-screen keyboard working
Onscreen Keyboard for the Mouse Available for KDE Plasma 6 Wayland?
2

Nice job!

In addition to uinput backend, it’s also possible to use xdg remote portal or kwin’s eis integration. Something for reference:

https://mcpmarket.com/en/server/kwin

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I don’t know enough about either of these to implement these features. However, I am open towards pull requests in GitHub.

4

Works great!
Supports German and Bulgarian (Cyrillic) layouts.
However, the letters on the keys remain the same as on the English layout.
Is there a way to fix or customize this?

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@Sergej_Reznik Can you send me photos of how the German and Bulgarian layouts are supposed to look like? Then I can add those layouts.

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See an ideal case (all in one) German-russian layouts :slight_smile:

tastaturaufkleber_deutsch_russisch_laminat_gelb_00086
tastaturaufkleber_deutsch_russisch_laminat_gelb_00086754×324 68.6 KB

7

You should look for a way to detect it automatically. At least that’s what the X11 keyboards do (at least e.g. Florence and probably Onboard, not sure about the other ones or the Wayland ones). Hard-coding hundreds of layouts does not seem like a good solution.

8

Some other issues that should be easy to fix:

  1. Modifier keys are great, but F1-12, Del, Home, End, Page Up/Down are also important. There probably should be a way to choose the layout such as full, minimal.

  2. The layout should be editable via some kind of config files, not in the source code.

  3. It should have some feedback when pressing the keys, such as changing the color, to make it feel much more natural and help reduce mistakes. Currently it changes the color when hovering on the keys, but it just stays the same until the cursor is removed from the key, which is not enough.
    For example, see how it is done in the latest Onboard :down_arrow:

    Open to see GIF

    Kooha-2026-05-10-12-02-51

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This is already implemented in the droid theme, but is missing in the other themes. I will fix it. Thanks for all the feedback.

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This looks good and might be my Wayland-show-continuer.

Can I put it in a window frame, or pop it out via mouse?

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It runs on the system tray. Just tap it/click on it. It does have a window frame

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12

Thank you! Beautiful, is there a minimum Plasma version requirement?

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I have tested in 5.27, 6.5, 6.6

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14

I will test in 5.27.12 and 6.3.6
Wayland only?

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Also works in x11. However, if you plan to stick to x11 then onboard maybe a better choice.

1 Like
16

It works great in 6.3.6 (Wayland)
Thank you this has really been missing as an option and you created it.
The layout is onboardish w/o the full-size keyboard.

Being on 720p, the window’s size is way too big. I tried creating a minimal size and rejected requested geometry as window rules (for application). No success, is there any way to make it smaller than the 906x452 pixels?

Haven’t tested in 5.27 yet but will.

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Not sure about the current version, but I think it was the problem with the default theme or something like that. In the simple Black theme, it can resized much smaller than that.

It should also work on Wayland now more or less normally except some minor issues, in the latest versions of the dr-ni fork.

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What is this fork?

Edit: Found it GitHub - dr-ni/onboard: Onboard is an onscreen keyboard useful for everybody that cannot use a hardware keyboard; for example TabletPC users, mobility impaired users,... · GitHub . Looks like a PR from another fork was recently merged into upstream Add Wayland support by AlexP11223 · Pull Request #49 · onboard-osk/onboard · GitHub

1 Like
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Yeah, I mean onboard-osk/onboard is what I call the fork, dr-ni created it, and he is the main maintainer. It is not the original abandoned Onboard repository which is in the Ubuntu SVNs.

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