squeekboard - a Wayland on-screen keyboard

Squeekboard is the on-screen-keyboard input-method for Phosh. It is primarily designed for smartphones, tablet-PCs, and other devices with touchscreens.

It squeaks because some Rust got inside.

Features

Present

• GTK3
• Custom keyboard layouts defined in yaml
• Input purpose dependent keyboard layouts
• DBus interface to show and hide
• Use Wayland input method protocol to submit text
• Use Wayland virtual keyboard protocol

TODO

• Port to GTK4 / GTK4-Layer-Shell
• Text prediction/correction
• Use preedit
• Submit actions like "next field" using a future Wayland protocol
• Pick up DBus interface files from /usr/share

Creating layouts

If you want to work on layouts, check out the guide.

Nightly builds

For testing the latest commits of the main-branch, one can install the nightly builds of Squeekboard. For more information about the nightly builds, read the "Phosh Nightly Package Builds"-blog-post.

Building

Dependencies

See .gitlab-ci.yml or run apt-get build-dep .

Build from git repo

$ git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/squeekboard.git
$ cd squeekboard
$ mkdir _build
$ meson setup _build/
$ cd _build
$ ninja

To run tests use ninja test. To install squeekboard run ninja install.

Running

$ cd ../build/
$ src/squeekboard

If no compatible Wayland compositor is running yet, you can use Phoc (after installing it):

$ phoc --exec 'src/squeekboard'

Squeekboard's panel will appear whenever a compatible application requests an input method. Click a text field in any GTK application, like python3 ./tools/entry.py.

Squeekboard honors the gnome "screen-keyboard-enabled" setting. Either enable this through gnome-settings under accessibility or run:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.applications screen-keyboard-enabled true

Alternatively, force panel visibility manually with:

$ busctl call --user sm.puri.OSK0 /sm/puri/OSK0 sm.puri.OSK0 SetVisible b true

or by using the environment-variable SQUEEKBOARD_DEBUG=force_show.

What the compositor has to support

A compatible compositor has to support the protocols:

• layer-shell
• virtual-keyboard-v1

It's strongly recommended to support:

• input-method-v2

Settings

You can change the height of the panel for the keyboard with:

$ gsettings set sm.puri.Squeekboard scale-in-horizontal-screen-orientation 1.0
$ gsettings set sm.puri.Squeekboard scale-in-vertical-screen-orientation 1.0

Note: If the keyboard is open when the settings for the panel-height are changed, the height of the keyboard will not change until it is opened again, or the layout is changed. While using Phosh, you can long-click/long-tap the home-bar at the bottom, to open and close the keyboard.

To reset the settings to the default, you can use:

$ gsettings reset-recursively sm.puri.Squeekboard

Developing

See doc/hacking.md for this copy, or the official documentation for the current release.