[Sugar-devel] Sugar with a virtual (onscreen) keyboard

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 4:48 AM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 4:28 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> - Ideally something (Gnome I assume?) should trigger the keyboard overlay when you focus on a text field, perhaps with some hints about what the 'return' key behaviour should do (or expose a tab key as that is usually the other common text field navigation method). Dismissing the keyboard overlay when a text field is defocused would also be ideal.
>>
>> AFAIK, this requires a GTK+ module to be loaded. I'm still trying to
>> write a proof of concept implementation of this - it seems that
>> there's no documentation anywhere for writing GTK+ modules :-(
>
> Yeah, I gave up and just used LD_PRELOAD when I had this problem.  If
> you want to try the quick-and-dirty way for a proof of concept, this
> might be handy:
>  http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/cscott/journal2/tree/
>
> Do all of firefox/xulrunner/chrome use GTK widgets for text entry?
> I'm nervous that some programs might not pop up the keyboard
> appropriately.
>

Yes - it would be difficult to detect things in webkit/xulrunner. Also
it won't work for Scratch or Etoys. I think for such cases, having a
dbus service from sugar to show/hide the keyboard may be a good idea
(at least some activities may be able to take advantage of it)

> You could add a gesture to force the keyboard up even for badly
> behaved applications.  I think the iPad/iPhone gesture for that is
> dragging your finger from the bottom of the screen to the top.

Sounds like a good idea.
Thanks!
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]