For some time Plasma Wayland had built-in support for Qt Virtual Keyboard. This got dropped for better support based on the Wayland input method protocols. An application supporting this protocol is maliit. In this blog post I want to describe how to enable and configure maliit in a Plasma Wayland session.
The support for Qt Virtual Keyboard was added by me as it is quite important to offer first class virtual keyboard support out of the box. Unfortunately the best technical option, maliit, was unavailable back then in most distributions. This made it rather impossible to built on it and instead Qt Virtual Keyboard was used. Given that I am very happy that now maliit support gets added to distributions. When installing maliit please make sure to install the newer maliit-keyboard instead of the older maliit-framework and make sure that it has an up to date git snapshot.
For example in KDE Neon the package is called maliit-keyboard. If your distribution does not yet provide a package, please file a bug report.
To enable maliit in your Wayland session you need to edit your kwinrc configuration file:
kwrite ~/.config/kwinrc
and add the following:
[Wayland]
InputMethod=/usr/share/applications/com.github.maliit.keyboard.desktop
To be sure it gets activated correctly, log out and in again and enable the virtual keyboard in the system tray.
The keyboard has some default settings. To modify you need to use gsettings. I am not aware of a gui configuration thus it needs to be done from a command line.
E.g. to change the enabled languages from English and Emoji to English, German and Emoji use:
gsettings set org.maliit.keyboard.maliit enabled-languages "['en', 'de', 'emoji']"
And to switch the theme to BreezeDark use:
gsettings set org.maliit.keyboard.maliit theme BreezeDark
