As part of our efforts to improve out of box experience for touch screens I’m pleased to announce that Plasma 5.10 will provide integration for virtual keyboard.

Plasma 5.10 finally integrates qtvirtualkeyboard directly in the lockscreen component of the look and feel package. Support for Qt’s virtual keyboard is not new in Plasma in general, it is already fully integrated into the Plasma Wayland session. This change, though, can be used on both Wayland and X11.

The lockscreen got extended by a new button next to the keyboard layout switcher: “Virtual Keyboard”. When clicking this button the virtual keyboard gets enabled and one can use it (with both touch and mouse) to enter the password and unlock the screen.

As a nice side effect this finally enables the possibility to enter east Asian languages in the lock screen. So far we had to actively disable input methods on the lockscreen to prevent that the screen cannot be unlocked. As a side effect this meant that only latin characters can be used in the password. I hope that the new virtual keyboard can help here by providing a better experience.

As a note to our touch screen users. It’s possible to use Qt’s virtual keyboard for all Qt application. One just needs to specify the env variable QT_IM_MODULE=qtvirtualkeyboard. When entering text Qt pops up the virtual keyboard as an additional window. This is only needed in an X11 session. In a Wayland session KWin provides the integration and Qt apps (and other apps) get the virtual keyboard through the Wayland text input protocol.