dany/wvkbd

mirror of https://github.com/jjsullivan5196/wvkbd.git synced 2025-03-13 02:42:47 +01:00

Maarten van Gompel 2e476c6548 Made 'full' and 'simple' layouts less prone to mistyping and improved layout switching

- The full layout now squashes less keys in a row, to accomplish this
  the semicolon/colon, equal/plus and alt keys had to be sacrificed
  from the full layout (they're on the special/symbols layout still).
- The half-keys in the simple layout are removed, giving a bit more
  space.
- The default total keyboard height has been slightly enlarged (10px)
- The compose key moved down, it was too close to the 'a' (accidental
  presses). The tab key moved to the top-right.
- The spacing between the buttons is slightly larger (aesthetic only)
- The key for layer switching is now labelled more consistently with an icon, and indicates direction of switching with an arrow
- An extra "index" layout was added that can be activated by pressing
  Compose + the next/prev layout button. It has a key for each layout,
  even those not specified at start. This special layout does not appear
  in the normal layer cycling.
- The "Abc" key on secondary layers returns to the last alphabetical layout
- The compose layouts automatically hide when the user presses the space
  where there are no keys, no need to explicitly press the "Abc" key.

2023-08-31 11:39:17 +02:00

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wvkbd - On-screen keyboard for wlroots that sucks less

This project aims to deliver a minimal but practically usable implementation of a wlroots on-screen keyboard in legible C. This will only be a keyboard, not a feedback buzzer, led blinker, or anything that requires more than what's needed to input text quickly. The end product should be a static codebase that can be patched to add new features.

Features

Typing, modifier locking, layout switching
Positive visual feedback on key presses
Custom layouts and underlying keymaps
On-the-fly layout and keymap switching
Custom color schemes
Proper font drawing
Intuitive layouts
International layouts (cyrillic, arabic, persian, greek, georgian)
Support for 'Copy' keys which are not on the keymap
Emoji support
Compose key for character variants (e.g. diacritics)
Show/hide keyboard on signals (SIGUSR1 = hide, SIGUSR2 = show, SIGRTMIN = toggle)
Automatic portrait/landscape detection and subsequent layout switching

There are some areas that still need work:

Make sure the virtual input method in wayland is working as best as it can
Support for input method protocol in wayland, ability to respond to text fields

Install

You'll need the following developer packages

cairo
pango
wayland-client
xkbcommon

Make any customizations you would like in config.def.h and run make

The default set of layouts is called mobintl (mobile international), which groups various layouts aimed at mobile devices and also attempts to accommodate various international users. The resulting binary is called wvkbd-mobintl.

You can, however, define your own layouts by copying and modifying layout.mobintl.h and keymap.mobintl.h (replace mobintl for something like yourlayout). Then make your layout set using make LAYOUT=yourlayout, and the resulting binary will be wvkbd-yourlayout

Usage

Run wvkbd-mobintl (or the binary for your custom layout set).

You can switch between the layouts/layers of the keyboard by pressing the little keyboard key in the bottom-left. If you only want a subset of the available layers, you can define which wants you want and in what order you want to cycle through them using the -l parameter. This takes takes a ordered comma separated list of layout names that are defined in your layout set.

The keyboard can be hidden by sending it a SIGUSR1 signal, shown again by sending it SIGUSR2 or toggled by sending it SIGRTMIN. This saves some start up time and may be appropriate in some low-resource environments.

Wvkbd has an output mode -o that will echo its output to standard output. This facility can be used if users want audio/haptic feedback, a feature explicitly out of scope for wvkbd. To achieve this, simply pipe wvkbd's output through the external tool clickclack:

$ wvkbd-mobintl -l simple,special,emoji -o | clickclack -V -f keypress.wav

Another output mode, -O will let the keyboard output keys which are swiped over. It can be used by an external program, such as swipeGuess to get swipe-typing support.

$ wvkbd-mobintl -O | swipeGuess.sh words.txt | completelyTypeWord.sh

Contribute

Any contributions are welcome, there are two ways to contribute, the first one is preferred:

Sourcehut - Submit your patches using git mail to ~mil/sxmo-devel@lists.sr.ht, follow these contribution guidelines. Questions can also be asked on Sxmo's mailing lists.
Github - Submit a pull request or open an issue (legacy method)

This project was started by John Sullivan and is currently being maintained by the Sxmo project, whose maintainers will ensure both git remotes are kept in sync at all times.

For code contributions, please run make format (requires clang-format) before sending a patch (opening a PR) and include as much relevant detail as possible.

clickclack - Audio/haptic feedback (standalone)
swipeGuess - Word-completion for swipe-typing
Sxmo - A hackable mobile interface environment for Linux phones that adopted wvkbd as its keyboard
svkbd - A similar project as wvkbd but for X11 rather than Wayland
squeekboard - The virtual keyboard developed for the Librem5 (used by Phosh)

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