Mir has landed support for maliit-keyboard

[alan_g]

Support for the Wayland extensions (zwp_input_method_v1 and zwp_input_panel_v1) needed by maliit-keyboard (as used by Lomiri) have landed upstream in Mir. They are not in the Mir 2.15 release currently being tested, but will be available in subsequent releases.

As this was requested for Lomiri (by @dobey) I hope this of interest here. There will be some Lomiri work needed to use this in Lomiri so I hope the following will include enough information to guilde this.

Using Mir's support for maliit-keyboard

The easiest way to test this support is to install Miriway from edge and configure it to support maliit-keyboard:

sudo snap install miriway --classic --edge
sudo apt install maliit-keyboard
cat /etc/xdg/xdg-miriway/miriway-shell.config/ > ~/.config/miriway-shell.config
cat <<EOT >> ~/.config/miriway-shell.config
shell-add-wayland-extension=zwp_input_method_v1
shell-add-wayland-extension=zwp_input_panel_v1
shell-add-wayland-extension=zwp_primary_selection_device_manager_v1 # it isn't obvious why maliit-keyboard needs this
shell-component=miriway-unsnap maliit-keyboard
EOT

You can then log out and log back in into Miriway from the greeter. maliit-keyboard will show when input is on a text field*.

[*] The client needs to support one of the text-input-v{1,2,3} Wayland extensions.

Please report any issues on Mir's github: https://github.com/MirServer/mir/issues

[kugiigi]

@alan_g We really appreciate this Alan. Thank you for Mir information you share with us and being a bridge between UBports and the Mir team

[dobey]

shell-add-wayland-extension=zwp_primary_selection_device_manager_v1 # it isn't obvious why maliit-keyboard needs this

It seems this is necessary due to QtWayland requiring it. However, this commit suggests this may no longer be the case in 6.6.0. I don't know if it's been pulled into the KDE patch collection for 5.15 though.

Now we just need to get Lomiri fully onto Mir 2.x and Qt 5.15 so we can add the capability to ship the OSK in a confined click.