This is a simple virtual keyboard, intended to be used in environments, where no keyboard is available.
% make
% make install
This will create by default svkbd-sxmo, which is svkbd using an versatile
layout with multiple layers and overlays, and optimised for mobile devices.
It was designed for Simple X Mobile.
You can create svkbd for additional layouts by doing:
% make svkbd-$layout
This will take the file layout.$layout.h and create svkbd-$layout.
make install will then pick up the new file and install it accordingly.
% svkbd-sxmo
This will open svkbd at the bottom of the screen, showing the default English layout.
% svkbd-sxmo -d
This tells svkbd-sxmo to announce itself being a dock window, which then is managed differently between different window managers. If using dwm and the dock patch, then this will make svkbd being managed by dwm and some space of the screen being reserved for it.
% svkbd-sxmo -g 400x200+1+1
This will start svkbd-en with a size of 400x200 and at the upper left window corner.
You can enable layers on the fly through either the -l flag or through the SVKBD_LAYERS environment variable.
They both take a comma separated list of layer names (as defined in your layout.*.h). Use the ↺ button in the
bottom-left to cycle through all the layers.
The virtual keyboard comes with overlays that will show when certain keys are hold pressed for a longer time. For
example, a long press on the a key will enable an overview showing all kinds of diacritic combinations for a.
Overlay functionality interferes with the ability to hold a key and have it outputted repeatedly. You can disable
overlay functionality with the -O flag or by setting the environment variable SVKBD_ENABLEOVERLAYS=0. There is
also a key on the function layer of the keyboard itself to enable/disable this behaviour on the fly. Its label shows
≅ when the overlay functionality is enabled and ≇ when not.
This virtual keyboard does not actually modify the X keyboard layout, it simply relies on a standard US QWERTY layout (setxkbmap us) being activated. If you use another XKB layout you will get unpredictable output that does not match the labels on the virtual keycaps.
SXMO version:
git clone https://git.sr.ht/~mil/sxmo-svkbd
Original upstream:
git clone http://git.suckless.org/svkbd