I am using Plasma Active more and more. Recently, even Plasma Active 3 had been officially released/announced.

While Plasma Active is really usable I was pretty unlucky about the virtual keyboard. For “normal” use it should be very good. However, I also like to hack “on-device”. For this I need tab-completion in the shell, arrow keys to navigate in the shell, or the escape-key in order to use vim.

Hence, I created my own custom keyboard layout. Actually, I changed the default layout in order to meet my needs. While I was at it I also added more keys, changed the layout a little bit more, made the keyboard transparent, and increased the space between the virtual keyboard and the edge of the screen.

The transparency is no eye-candy. Personally, I think transparency is indeed very helpful as this way it is possible to see the things,  e.g., text in a terminal, beneath the keyboard.

The increased spacing between the keyboard and the screen helps, at least me, to use the keyboard. When the keyboard is too close to the edge of the screen I had some problems using the keys near the screen edge as the touch events seemed not to be very precise in that region.

Below is a screenshot of the keyboard in action.

If you want to use this keyboard, you can get it from one of my repositories. The listing below shows how this is done.

zypper ar http://repo.pub.meego.com/home:/wonko:/branches:/Project:/KDE:/Trunk:/Testing/CE_UX_PlasmaActive_armv7l/home:wonko:branches:Project:KDE:Trunk:Testing.repo
zypper up maliit-active libmaliit-quick
killall -9 maliit-server

Note that you need to update maliit-active and libmaliit-quick. In order to directly use the new keyboard you need to restart maliit-server. This can be done simply by killing it, it will be restarted automatically.