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tudor -Reinstate Monica-
Asked: 2019-06-24 22:22:57 +0800 CST

How do I enable *all* keys on the touchscreen keyboard?

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Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful that we have a touchscreen keyboard.

All the good keys are there for normal language...

Touchscreen keyboard in 19.04 alphabet keys

Keys are there to get into vim command mode....*

Touchscreen keyboard in 19.04 symbol keys

And I can write my bash scripts in emoji!

Touchscreen keyboard in 19.04 emoji keys

But wait, now I'm stuck!

How do I:

  • ESC (escape current mode in vi??) Can't get back my work!!
  • CTRL (I can't CTRL+Z to jump back to the same shell)
  • ARROW KEYS (How am I ever going to play Kings Quest on DosBox now???)

:-(

:-p

*(Please excuse the hidden joke if you try this.)

keyboard keyboard-layout touchscreen

1 Answers

  1. The GNOME On Screen Keyboard (OSK) is designed to generate keyboards from the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository data. The Unicode CLDR was never intended to limit the keys available, but that seems to be the path the GNOME developers are following. If a key isn't in the CLDR, there is no way to type it. So, that means, no Esc, no F1, no Control, etc.

    Theoretically, you can install caribou antler and customize your own keyboards. However, it didn't work for me and I resorted to xvkbd which is hoary and ugly but gets the job done. (Tip: If your window manager loses focus when you click in xvkbd, use the Focus button to pick which window to type into.)

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