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Tom Mercer
Asked: 2017-10-16 16:19:43 +0800 CST

On-screen keyboard popping up whenever I touch screen

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I'm in 17.10. Whenever I touch the screen, whether to change windows/apps, scroll within a browser, or press a button, the stupid little keyboard pops up in the bottom left corner.

I have never left Screen Keyboard enabled in Universal Access, but if I toggle it on, that's the same keyboard popping up in the bottom left corner.

screenshot of keyboard taking over

In this screenshot, I'm simply touching the screen in a full-screen youtube video. You can see the menu pop up on the right, under the point where I'm touching.

I don't have a before pic, but it was similar look/color keyboard, but it was smaller, maybe half as wide, and only in the bottom left section of the screen, as opposed to stretching across the entire width. This change from little left-hand keyboard to full-width keyboard happened after following @pomsky 's advice below.

This is a confirmed bug. You can mark yourself affected by it to hopefully increase its received attention.

touchscreen

2 Answers

  1. Caribou also kept popping up to my great annoyance, so I wrote a gnome extension that monkey patches gnome-shell to stop popping up the keyboard when the touchscreen is pressed.. It's only a couple of lines of js, but the git repo is here

    How to use extensions

    1. To manage gnome extensions, download gnome-tweak-tool with 

      sudo apt install gnome-tweak-tool

    2. Gnome extensions are downloaded through the official gnome-extensions website, which requires a native connector to communicate with gnome-shell. Install this native connector (even if you're running Firefox) with

      sudo apt install chrome-gnome-shell

    3. Finally to install the extension, go to the extension's page and hit the switch in the top right corner. Gnome will than prompt you to install the extension. These extensions can be managed through the gnome tweak tool. However, to uninstall them, you must use the web page.

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  2. I'm running Ubuntu 16.04 and had a similar problem when running Synergy. Sometimes the on-screen keyboard would pop up for no reason and I couldn't get it to go away. I finally decided to just remove Caribou:

    sudo dpkg --remove --force-depends caribou
ps -eF | grep caribou | awk "{print $2}" | xargs kill -9 {}+

    That left the keyboard still stuck on the screen, but I locked the screen (crtl+alt+L) and logged back in, then the keyboard dropped away.

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