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I just got a Lenovo Yoga 720 that is now running Ubuntu 18.04. transitioning from windows to ubuntu was painless and pleasant. I got this laptop with intent to use it for a lot of drawing on the go, so it spends a lot of time in tablet mode using Krita for all my art.

My problem is: when its in tablet mode, Ubuntu tries to be smart and predict when to bring up the on-screen keyboard for typing. it's fine in the system menus, but I can't get it to pop up at all while using Firefox or Krita, and this is likely a problem for other programs too.

Is there a way to add an icon in the top-right corner to make the on-screen keyboard appear for such occasions? Hopefully I'm being dense and there already is one or something, but if I can't get the on-screen keyboard to pop up when I need it, then the on-screen keyboard is useless to me.

William Ethridge
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3 Answers3

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I'm not sure if I changed any settings, but on Ubuntu bionic (18.04) swiping up from the bottom of the screen will bring up the on screen keyboard.

NeilenMarais
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NeilenMarais is right in the other answer, but swiping up works ONLY in a Wayland session and is difficult to discover even then. It does not work in the default X login session.

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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. Judging by the confusion int his 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)

  4. 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.

  5. 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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You can make on-screen board available There is proper documentation about this here

In nutshell

  • Open the Activities overview and start typing Universal Access.

  • Click on Universal Access to open the panel.

  • Switch on Screen Keyboard in the Typing section.

twister_void
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