GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 739636
gnome-weather (or gtk?)'s dropdown text entry for cities fights with the gnome-shell onscreen keyboard (caribou)
Last modified: 2017-07-13 09:46:34 UTC
When you start Weather initially it asks to type which city you're in, and it autocompletes what you type by offering a dropdown list. The problem is that if you have a touchscreen and are using gnome-shell's onscreen keyboard (caribou?), every letter will have to be typed twice because the text entry steals the focus everytime it appears, or something like that.
I don't know if this is caribou's or gtk's fault, but most certainly it's not libgweather's/gnome-weather's, because all GWeatherLocationEntry is doing is a GtkEntry with a custom ::changed handler. Let's pick gtk+ for now - at least they'll know if my analysis is wrong.
I see this issue on everything that produces a drop-down list of suggestions. Try i. gnome-weather (as OP reported), ii. firefox address-bar: type anything that produces the suggestion dropdown to appear, you have to key in every character twice, as soon as you have typed enough that firefox does not suggest anything, keying in every character once is enough iii. epiphany address-bar, same as firefox address-bar and probably (I have only tested the three above) all others where drop-down suggestions are shown.
Still very much an issue with GNOME 3.18.1. This is my single biggest complaint against the on-screen keyboard when using a touchscreen. Affects usage with firefox, gnome-weather, anything and everything that brings up a drop-down list of suggestions or entries.
Sorry, perhaps this isn't being helpful or anything, but ping?
GNOME is pretty usable on a tablet these days (I use 3.24.x on my convertible) except for this one issue that sticks out like a very sore thumb. Still effects firefox, gnome-weather, epiphany, and probably numerous others. The on-screen keyboard is pretty awful generally (try using with epiphany's address bar and see how the address-bar dropdown covers the keyboard up almost completely, for instance), but I feel like this is the most annoying of all.
I get this bug is older than #740554, but that one seems reported to a more proper place, I am closing this one as a duplicate of it. FWIW this is a non-issue on wayland, and pretty much unfixable on X11, since that's just how override redirect windows work, and the compositor can't do much about these except drawing them on top of everything, because that's the X server's concept of that window and mutter can just follow. That said, I think it makes more sense to have this bug filed against the compositor (as #740554 is) than GtkEntry, since the latter is just a messenger, and not just the only one. Eg. firefox's completion window is not based on GtkEntryCompletion, but of course has the same issue because there's no other way to implement popups than through override redirect windows and grabs. It's pretty much a problem with the pattern, not intrinsic to GTK+. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 740554 ***