Ubuntu
gnome-shell package

  1. Bug #1760399
  2. Comment #10

Comment 10 for bug 1760399

Revision history for this message
Mario Vukelic (kreuzsakra) wrote : Re: New On-screen keyboard cannot be manually triggered to appear

So after much hair pulling I contacted the author of the above mentioned Gnome extension and he set me on the right track (thank you):

1. Auto-summon of OSK only works with application/toolkit support. Text widgets in alien (non-Gnome or non-Gtk?) toolkits don't summon the OSK (Gnome, Firefox, Qt, whatever other toolkits; I don't know if this is even standardized by freedesktop.org.

2. Because of alien toolkits there is always a need to summon on demand. Since Gnome 3.28 in Ubuntu 18.04, you can summon on a touch screen by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. However, this ONLY works in a Wayland session, not in X. I can confirm that it does. None of this is described in the Gnome 3.28 release notes or the Ubuntu 18.04 help. These are clearly documentation bugs.

3. Judging by the confusion int his bug report and the many questions on Askubuntu,com, it seems that the swiping up eluded even those users who have access to the feature because they use Wayland. Quite clearly this is not sufficiently discoverable, which IMHO is a bug. (Of course this is not helped by the buggy docs)

4. The Gnome extension to summon on-demand (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1061/on-screen-keyboard-button/) does NOT work with touch in Ubuntu 18.04 (Gnome 3.28) according to the author, and neither does it in Cosmic (3.30). It works with the mouse but this is awkward to say the least. The author will hopefully be able to look into it but it may take some time.

5. I don't know why in Gnome 3.30 (Cosmic) the auto-summon only works for Activities and Applications menus search boxes, and not elsewhere in Gnome as far as I can find. Hard to believe that this is a bug in every Gnome application, maybe a Gtk bug?