Ubuntu 22.04 LTS GNOME Touchscreen Keyboard

The GNOME Desktop Environment is one of the best Linux Desktop Environments for 2 in 1 Touchscreen Devices. It has an inbuilt onscreen keyboard that can be enabled from the Accessibility Menu in settings. In theory this onscreen keyboard should automatically populate when pressing into a text input field. The touch keyboard autopopulates when pressing into the search box in Settings and Files.

The touch keyboard does not work correctly in the address bar and search box in browsers where is far more likely to be used. It works sometimes in Firefox but never in Chromium (or Google Chrome which is of course Chromium based).

There is also no inbuilt solution to add a Touch Keyboard button to the address bar like there is for example on Windows on the Taskbar.

Fortunately we can install GNOME Extensions and install the improved osk extension by NickShmyrev. Then we can configure this extension to Show the statusbar icon and we can also select the option to ignore touch-input giving you the flexibility to invoke the onscreen keyboard by pressing or clicking this button with the mouse.

The improved osk is better than the original but still lacking behind the onscreen keyboard with Mathematical symbols and Greek letters available in Windows 11.

#touchscreen #ubuntu #keyboard