Here’s an extension recommended you’ll be grateful to get to grips with.
It’s called Improved OSK GNOME extension and it does just that: it makes GNOME’s onscreen keyboard more featured and more user-friendly to use.
Don’t get me wrong; the standard OSK? It’s perfectly serviceable. It pops up (mostly) when you need it, lets you punch in regular text, numbers, and special characters, has a tab key (important when running terminal commands) and an excellent emoji picker.
But it has downsides.
Sometimes the standard OSK doesn’t appear when you tap inside non-GTK app text fields; you’re unable enter multi-key shortcuts (like alt + tab), access function (FN) keys at all, or “sticky” the shift key to, for example, type in angry all-caps!
Thankfully, those are things that the Improved OSK GNOME extension can do.
When installed it replaces GNOME’s vanilla OSK with a more feature-filled alternative. You don’t need to do anything to set it up either: just install the extension, enable it, log out, back in, and away you go.
It offers:
- More keys including arrow, Esc, Tab, Ctrl, Alt, F1-12, etc
- Supports multi-key entry (e.g.,
ctrl+v,alt+F2, etc) - Keyboard size and layout customization
- Panel icon to manually toggle keyboard
It works pretty much everywhere it should (including password modals) and most of its features are easy to find. The layout is a little different (it needs to be to accommodate more keys), and I do miss a keyboard “press” state so I can tell I’ve smudged a key.
Improved OSK can be used on the GDM login screen but this is not an “out-of-the-box” behavior. See the project GitHub page for information on how to enable this.
Also, on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (where I tested it) the super (aka windows) key is a diamond. I’m not sure if this something related to Ubuntu’s Yaru theming rather than what the devs intended – either way, if you see a diamond and wonder what it’s for, it’s for super!
