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I have Ubuntu 18.04 on a Lenovo Yoga 520 laptop, which has both a keyboard and touchscreen. When working in touchscreen mode, the screen keyboard shows up in most programs, but not in Firefox, for instance when I want to type something in the address bar.

Is there any way to correct this error and make the virtual keyboard show up in Firefox?

Alternatively, is there any way to force the screen keyboard to show up, e.g. by means of a keystroke or something?

jantzu
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3 Answers3

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I was just having the same problem on my HP Spectre 360. The screen keyboard seems to only automatically appear for gnome terminal and the text editor, nothing else. I started just trying things and a swipe up from the bottom of the screen makes the keyboard appear. It has a button with a down arrow (more of a small v actually) to make it go away again.

Bryan Murdock
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Note that the Ubuntu 18.04 help on this is misleading at the very least if not entirely incorrect, as were the Release notes of Gnome 3.28 when the new on-screen keyboard was introduced. Following is a (slightly edited for correctness) copy of my recent comment on an earlier bug report. You can find further links including additional new bug reports there: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1760399

  • Auto-summon of OSK only works with application/toolkit support. Text widgets in alien (non-Gnome or non-Gtk?) toolkits don't summon the OSK (Chrome, Firefox, Qt, whatever other toolkits; I don't know if this is even standardized by freedesktop.org.

  • Because of alien toolkits there is always a need to summon on demand. Since Gnome 3.28 in Ubuntu 18.04, you can summon on a touch screen by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. However, this ONLY works in a Wayland session, not in X. I can confirm that it does. None of this is described in the Gnome 3.28 release notes or the Ubuntu 18.04 help. These are clearly documentation bugs.

  • Judging by the confusion in this bug report and the many questions on Askubuntu,com, it seems that the swiping up eluded even those users who have access to the feature because they use Wayland. Quite clearly this is not sufficiently discoverable, which IMHO is a bug. (Of course this is not helped by the buggy docs)

  • The Gnome extension to summon on-demand (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1061/on-screen-keyboard-button/) does NOT work with touch in Ubuntu 18.04 (Gnome 3.28) according to the author, and neither does it in Cosmic (3.30). It works with the mouse but this is awkward to say the least. The author will hopefully be able to look into it but it may take some time.

  • I don't know why for me in Gnome 3.30 (Cosmic) the auto-summon only works for Activities and Applications menus search boxes, and not elsewhere in Gnome as far as I can find. Hard to believe that this is a bug in every Gnome application, maybe a Gtk bug?

Knuckles
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Think I solved it, at least this works (Así se activa el teclado touch en Firefox, usando Ubuntu 18.04):

  1. Download and open the tweak tool/Descarga y abre un programa que se llama "retoques", aunque te conviene más buscarlo como tweak tool
  2. Go to Keyboard & Mouse, enable the extended input sources (the first option) /Abre "retoques" y ve, en el menú del lado izquierdo, a donde dice "Teclado y ratón". Ahí abre el switch, el primero, que dice "Mostrar las fuentes de entrada extendidas"
  3. Restart session when required/Te va a pedir que reinicies la sesión. Reinicia la sesión.
  4. Go to ubuntu set up/Cuando regrese tu sesión, ve a la configuración de Ubuntu
  5. In Universal Access enable the first switch, which will show a download menu on top of Ubuntu's desktop/En la sección de "Acceso Universal", abre el primer switch, que coloca un menú en la parte superior del escritorio
  6. This menú will permit you to switch on and off the touchpad keyboard whenever you wish./En este menú, aparece una opción de teclado en pantalla que te permite acceder al teclado touch cada vez que lo necesites. Ten cuidado de no activar las otras opciones, que son para distintos tipos de capacidades diferentes, y pueden provocar efectos raros en el escritorio.

Lo importante es activar las fuentes extendidas en el tweak tool. Suerte.

Renato González Mello
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