I have installed Maliit keyboard and enabled it under the virtual keyboard settings. It currently seems only possible to use the virtual keyboard with touch devices. I have searched the web countless times and never found a way to show the virtual keyboard on a regular laptop. A hotkey/widget to show/hide the virtual keyboard while a physical keyboard is present would be a huge plus. This seems like a big oversight in terms of accessibility. Use cases: - typing on a laptop with damaged keyboard (a friend does this on windows) - typing in a language with different script (I need it to type Russian) - probably more that I'm not familiar with Operating System: Arch Linux KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.2 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.103.0 Qt Version: 5.15.8 Kernel Version: 6.2.2-arch1-1 (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 8 × AMD Ryzen 7 2700U with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx Memory: 15.3 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon Vega 3 / 10 Graphics Manufacturer: LENOVO Product Name: 20KUCTO1WW System Version: ThinkPad E485
Yeah, right now when KWin receives the signal to show the virtual keyboard, it ignores it if the input event associated with it wasn't a touch event. This is done to prevent the virtual keyboard from appearing constantly in response to automatic or manually-driven focus events when using a keyboard or pointing device, which would drive people crazy. But, it also prevents the virtual keyboard from being openable manually, as a deliberate user action. We'll probably need a new way to communicate to KWin that we want to force it to show anyway with no event filtering, and then a "Show/hide virtual keyboard" button can use that.
*** Bug 460823 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2780
Git commit 508b6710653fd5896d2046561f8ab41aa951cf68 by Nate Graham, on behalf of Alexander Volkov. Committed on 28/03/2023 at 14:57. Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'. components/keyboardlayout: Fix forced activation of vkbd We have to register for the metatype to call it from here. M +7 -0 components/keyboardlayout/keyboardlayoutplugin.cpp https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/commit/508b6710653fd5896d2046561f8ab41aa951cf68
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_requests/2781
Git commit 9d4b9cf547037cbb3b4aaf7c21ad08f75ea98f48 by Nate Graham, on behalf of Alexander Volkov. Committed on 28/03/2023 at 14:59. Pushed by ngraham into branch 'Plasma/5.27'. components/keyboardlayout: Fix forced activation of vkbd We have to register for the metatype to call it from here. (cherry picked from commit 508b6710653fd5896d2046561f8ab41aa951cf68) M +7 -0 components/keyboardlayout/keyboardlayoutplugin.cpp https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/commit/9d4b9cf547037cbb3b4aaf7c21ad08f75ea98f48
*** Bug 477160 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 477207 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 488346 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Bug 488346 included a request to quickly force open the on-screen keyboard by swiping up from the bottom of the screen (like Gnome does). I'd also love to see that feature, but hesitate to file another bug, given that one was already marked as a dup of this (which doesn't appear to cover that functionality).