Bug 502882 - Feature request: support the virtual keyboard support wayland protocol
Summary: Feature request: support the virtual keyboard support wayland protocol
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 497774
Alias: None
Product: kwin
Classification: Plasma
Component: wayland-generic (other bugs)
Version First Reported In: unspecified
Platform: Other Linux
: NOR wishlist
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: KWin default assignee
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2025-04-16 15:15 UTC by Tobias Bora
Modified: 2025-04-17 03:45 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

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Description Tobias Bora 2025-04-16 15:15:21 UTC
SUMMARY

Waylands defines a virtual keyboard protocol (unstable) https://wayland.app/protocols/virtual-keyboard-unstable-v1 that allows us to programmatically type any UTF-8 sequence, including emoji etc… independently of the input method. This protocol is supported by many compositor (sway, hyprland, cosmic, niri, labwc, mir… and more), but Kwin does not implement it. In practice, it means that tools like wlrctl or wtype (xdotool for wayland) will return errors:

```
$ wtype ∇⋅∇ψ = ρ
Compositor does not support the virtual keyboard protocol
$ wlrctl keyboard type 'Hello, world!'
Virtual Keyboard interface not found!
```

It makes it hard to program accessibility programs, or play with tools like kmonad or keyd to add keys to type emoji or arbitrary UTF-8 sequences (math, chinese…). For now, one needs to rely on hacks, like using an XCompose file (poorly support a huge number of files), the C-S-u functionality of ibus (not supported in xim, and also the keycode of s changes when the keyboard layout changes so it is not very stable),  or copy/pasting the emoji… very dirty in any case.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Run `wtype ∇⋅∇ψ = ρ`. 

OBSERVED RESULT

Compositor does not support the virtual keyboard protocol

EXPECTED RESULT

∇⋅∇ψ = ρ should be typed.

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Windows: 
macOS: 
(available in the Info Center app, or by running `kinfo` in a terminal window)
Linux/KDE Plasma: NixOS unstable
KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.12.0
Qt Version: 6.8.2

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Comment 1 John Kizer 2025-04-17 03:45:46 UTC
Hi - merging this in with the existing feature request for that protocol. Thanks!

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 497774 ***