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Hello,

KDE is lacking a viable onscreen keyboard with word completion. There are a few onscreen keyboards like kvkbd and xvkbd but they are minimal at best.

Windows 7 onscreen keyboard with word completion is impressive. I think having a robust onscreen keyboard with word completion would help those who have difficulty typing and make KDE more accessible.

What about porting over Android's Keyboard with word completion?

I don't know about word completion, but work is being done to make it more usable and sensitive.

aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/09/on-screen-keyboard.html <-- I think that is the URL which explains it (my internet doesn't seem to want to visit it)

As an input method developer, I would say word completion should not be a "on-screen keyboard" feature, that's not how things works. It's something that should be implemented in input method. Then input method and on-screen keyboard co-operate.

And word completion is not as hard as you guys think, library like hspell which provides spell check will be enough.

Csslayer,

I'm not a dev but it seems that word completion is not a seperate feature for most on-screen keyboards.

Why would it be beneficial as an independent input method feature?

doctorwhite wrote:Csslayer,

I'm not a dev but it seems that word completion is not a seperate feature for most on-screen keyboards.

Why would it be beneficial as an independent input method feature?

There is two way to implement a on-screen keyboard, one is to simulate the hardware key event, one is on-screen keyboard is only a UI for input method.

If you think about android, or meego, or even the current implementation of the on-screen keyboard is a part of input method. Only input method can have the knowledge that what is pending to input, called "Preedit" in input method. Only input method can know when the field is focused and un-focused.

And there can be only one input method running at the same time. So if on-screen keyboard want to also support CJK input, other language keyboard in the future, it would need to implement all these thing inside one input method.

What in my mind there is two way, first, replace the current one with Maliit, and people can easy use maliit to implement there's IM, for the appearance of the keyboard, the plasma one can also be used (Maliit also use Qt).

The other is make the input method independent keyboard, and it must have the ability to display string, send key event to the input method, let input method configure the keyboard layout (maybe via json or xml). In this way the existing input method need smaller work that is to add this keyboard support. This is what I want to do for the kimpanel.

I agree, that predictive word completition should be in input box, not in virtual keyboard.

As in that way, we can even offer that feature when having a physical keyboard in use and it would follow same logic than what we have now with drop-down list with auto completation (right click any KDE input box and you can choose how completation is done).

I would really much love to see suggestions in input boxes, like when user is typing to IM or IRC input box, words would be suggested and corrected inline, instead later with red coloring and then show suggestion behind right click.

I can understand on small screen devices it is implemented in virtual keyboard itself so it would take much less space and we can have fullscreen input boxes.

One thing what I simply love is the autocomplete in terminals and KDE input boxes what gets auto added with tab.

Fri13,

There is something like autocomplete in terminals called bash-completition. Search for it in the repos.

As for word completition should be in a input box, I am all for it. Typing using kvkbd takes a long time. What else can we do to get this implemented?

For anyone might interest in this idea, I have a little input method, which will works with kimpanel, implement some idea of word-completion, this is what I mentioned in above comment: implement word completion inside input method.

http://uploads.csslayer.tk/uploads/vide ... yboard.ogv

For Plasma Active, I hope a specical version of kimpanel which has a on-screen keyboard can be implemented to make this idea: on-screen keyboard with word completion into reality.

Any progress?