Onboard is unusable on HiDPI screens

[Olivier Cortès]

I use Ubuntu 14.04, with all packages up-to-date (onboard 1.0.0 at the moment) on a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro with the Ubuntu GNOME flavor, and the gnome3-staging PPA for GNOME 3.12 (which has better HiDPI support). But these problems have showed since the 14.04 rc1, with GNOME 3.10

When using onboard, it correctly displays. But:

- only the top-left quarter of it is actually typable with fingers. It seems onboards displays at full size, but considers only a quarter of its surfaces maps the whole keyboard.
- when the "resize application" preference is ticked, the application windows are effectively pushed, but only half the height of the onboard window.
- anecdotically, a 1 pixel line of my desktop background show at the very bottom of the screen (seems an off-by-one rouding error).

It seems the 2 problems are "classical" when talking about HiDPI screens.

[Francesco Fumanti (frafu)]

Hi,

Our stable PPA for Onboard offers an updated version, that addresses a few issues of Onboard related to screens with an high DPI. You might want to give it a try:
https://launchpad.net/~onboard/+archive/stable

Please, let us know whether the updated version improves your situation, in case you are going to try it.

Cheers,

Francesco

[Olivier Cortès (olive)]

OK, you made my day.

I was looking for the PPA, but didn't manage to find it. Thanks !

Onboard is usable, and it's far better than GOK and florence at typing "normally" with multiple fingers like on a physical keyboard. Not even to mention the other features like word completion which is very nice and completes shell commands, etc.

You developers did a very nice work with onboard.

There are still minor issues, though, on the PPA version:

- when configured to popup automatically, sometimes it pops up "higher" on screen (eg in the middle instead of the bottom), with a lot of empty space under it.

- it does not behave as expected (eg. like the physical keyboard) when the setting “invert control and caps lock“ is enabled (which I have).

Describing exactly what onboard does with the 2 keys is difficult to express easily in human terms, but if you see it it's perfectly understandable. The situation can be worked around with a supplemental keypress to "unlock" the caps lock which gets locked on control-press, but pressing caps then doesn't lock it at all. Sorry if it's not clear.

Do you want me to fill dedicated tickets for these 2 problems ?

[Francesco Fumanti (frafu)]

Hi,

Thanks for your pleasing words about Onboard.

Concerning your first issue about Onboard moving to the middle of the screen: Onboard tries to move out of the way of the widget that will receive its input. Are you trying to tell us that it is not smart enough when it moves away, or were you surprised by the mere fact, that it moves away? If you want it to stay always at the bottom or at the top of the screen you can enable docking in Onboard's Preferences.

Concerning your issue about the invert control and caps lock: marmuta, who has written most of Onboard's code these last years, might know what you mean; let's wait for his comment about it.

Cheers

[marmuta (marmuta)]

Hi Oliver, good to hear the PPA helps and thanks for the nice words.
Your initial bug has been reported before, the work happened in Bug #1283491, so I'm going to duplicate this one to it.

Some questions and answers:

> - when the "resize application" preference is ticked...
Where can I find this particular toggle? I haven't seen it in stock Ubuntu, is it new in the gnome staging PPA?

> when configured to popup automatically, sometimes it pops up "higher" on screen
Depending on the situation this could be a feature or a bug. If there is a focused text entry that would be partly of fully covered by Onboard, then the keyboard moves out of the way to fully reveal that text entry. This is by design, to help you see what you are going to type.
If the window just arbitrarily, for no discernible reason moves to the middle of the screen, then that could be a bug. In that case please open a new bug report.

> - it does not behave as expected (eg. like the physical keyboard)
> when the setting “invert control and caps lock“ is enabled (which I have).
How do you enable the “invert control and caps lock“ setting? I haven't heard of it before. Is that an xkb option?
If it does what I think it does, I can imagine it not working properly. Onboard makes a number of assumptions about modifier keys, and there isn't a lot of flexibility for redefining their behavior. I'd like to change that at some point, but it is not an easy feat. My suggestion is that you open a separate bug report. Once we get to reworking the modifiers I'd like to test this configuration too.

[Olivier Cortès (olive)]

Re, and sorry for the lag, my life is quite full…

About the random poping location, I cannot reproduce it now. Seems like unckeching then rechecking the setting has solved the issue. It could be related to "auto-popup when text-field is in focus" or "reduce screen area when poping up". As I'm not sure, I will not open any new issue until I'm sure to have a reliable way to reproduce it.

About the keyboard layout. I use GNOME 3.12 from staging PPA currently (on Ubuntu 14.04 up-to-date).

My preference / keymap modifier is found in GNOME Tweak Tool > Typing > Control Key Position > Invert Control & Caps Lock.

In gnome 3.10, this was easily found in the “keyboard layout” pref pane, but it disappeared in 3.12 (sadly).

Historically, this setting occurs at the X level, as far as I remember. I know used to tweak xorg.conf file to add it, and now that I can do it at GNOME level, I keep using the GUI.

Another question (sorry for bugging you here, tell me if there is a more appropriate forum or whatever) :

In the assistive tech pref pane, "onscreen keyboard" is checked.
In onboard prefs, "popup on unlock screen is checked".

In 3.12, when the wifi passkey popup appears, and on the unlock screen, only GOK popsup.
If i uncheck the setting in assistive tech, GOK doesn't popup anymore on lock screen, but onboard doesn't either.
For the wifi passkey modal, no onscreen keyboard popsup anymore, and the modal prevents me to activate onboard via the always-visible icon. I cannot even make it popup with my touchegg shortcut (4-fingers tap).

Thus, in tablet-mode, I'm sometimes stuck without any mean to popup any onscreen keyboard.

I didn't search this particular issue in launchpad. If you have one in mind, I will copy/move this point over there.

Thanks for your answers and time,