OSK infrastructure

[leolost2605]

Fixes #1460
Fixes elementary/keyboard#2
Fixes elementary/keyboard#3
Fixes elementary/keyboard#5

Note: To test this you need to start an app with GTK_IM_MODULE=wayland

TODO:

• icons for special buttons
• Popup keys -> follow up
• Language selection -> follow up
• Emoji selection -> follow up
• IBus suggestions -> follow up

[leolost2605]

This should be enough infrastructure for an initial osk:

Kooha-2026-03-26-18-20-52.mp4

@danirabbit @desiderantes any opinions/suggestions on design etc.? (I pinged you because I saw you talked about OSK in discord). If you have some ideas regarding structure/design/etc. that would be great!

If not I'll probably do it like GNOME does it so that we can also reuse their file format for keyboard layouts 🤷

[danirabbit]

@leolost2605 being able to re-use layouts from an existing OSK sounds like a good idea to me! We can always revisit if for some reason it's too restrictive, but otherwise I like doing less work 😜

[desiderantes]

There's some wayland protocols for virtual keyboards that might be of interest ( I experimented implementing them, because I was playing with basing the logic on the Android keyboard). Mainly the one for virtual keyboard and maybe input v2

[leolost2605]

There's some wayland protocols for virtual keyboards that might be of interest ( I experimented implementing them, because I was playing with basing the logic on the Android keyboard). Mainly the one for virtual keyboard and maybe input v2

Thanks for the input! I don't think input v2 applies here. Also we have usually done any interaction with the compositor that doesn't involve actual surfaces via dbus so I would keep doing it via dbus in this case too.

[leolost2605]

I've been using this for a few months now and it's working great. I haven't marked this ready the whole time because I wanted to get the TODOs done but I think it's probably better to save them for a follow up since the main thing is already working great. So this should be ready for review now. The main TODO that maybe should still be done in this PR are icons for

• delete
• enter
• shift
• hiding the keyboard

To test this you need to be in touch mode (tablets by default, 2 in 1s when in tablet mode) or enable it manually via /org/gnome/desktop/a11y/applications/screen-keyboard-enabled. Also the same things as in #2793 apply (GTK_IM_MODULE must be unset or set to wayland)

[danirabbit]

If someone doesn't get to it before me I'll propose icons Monday!

[wpkelso]

@danirabbit Many keyboards I've seen use symbols that have unicode codepoints in the misc. technical block or the [arrows block] for the action and modifier keys. That might could be another solution? Some of them are... questionable in GitHub's choice of font lol

For example:
⌘ ⌥ ⌫ ⌦ ⌨ ⎇ ⎆ ⏎ ⏿

[danirabbit]

it looks like we actually get icon names from the layout json files:

• osk-caps-lock-symbolic
• osk-delete-symbolic
• osk-emoji-picker-symbolic
• osk-enter-symbolic
• osk-hide-symbolic
• osk-layout-symbolic
• osk-shift-symbolic
• osk-zwnj-symbolic

[danirabbit]

Approving on behalf of UX! This is a super awesome start. Already pretty nice to type on. Can't wait to continue to iterate here 🩷