GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 659180
On screen keyboard lacks control key
Last modified: 2019-02-27 19:46:53 UTC
As far as I can tell the new on screen keyboard doesn't have a control key. Having this would be great for keyboard short cuts and quick navigation in text boxes (ctrl-a, ctrl-e), opening new tabs, etc. Speaking of that I wonder if alt and cursor keys would be useful too? There seems to be plenty of space available in the current layout.
you can get a few more keys by doing gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keyboard keyboard-type fullscale though generally the theory is that you're not going to use the OSK for shortcuts, you're only going to use it to type text. I had started some work on a full keyboard (using xkb to get the full layout). I need to dump that into bugzilla...
caribou+xkb bug is bug 660368
(In reply to comment #1) > you can get a few more keys by doing > > gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keyboard keyboard-type fullscale This looks great in general but doesn't use more space to the left and right but makes the current keys smaller. Do we have a bug to track screen usage of the keyboard? > > though generally the theory is that you're not going to use the OSK for > shortcuts, you're only going to use it to type text. I mostly agree here but I'd be nice to be able to add some keys to extra screen space available. Especially keys that ease navigation in text like "jump to beginning of line", "jump to end of line" are very useful when e.g. entering/modifying. URLs. Maybe I'm tackling this all wrong and the extra screen space shouldn't be filled with "classic" keys and modifiers but with keys having a certing function already: easing navigation in text (jump word left, jump word right, jump to beginning of line, jump to end of line). The use case I'm looking at is larger screens without a keyboard so "pointing" at the place where you want to enter the text is cumbersome since you'd have to move your arm a lot.
*** Bug 735783 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Arrow keys make a lot of sense to navigate around in an entry. Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X are all very useful, basic editing shortcuts. One could argue that these actions should just be represented as such on the osk...
Moving to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues/181.