The on screen keyboard changes layout between applications. The most useful is the one with Terminal as it includes CTRL, ALT and the arrow keys. Is there a way to force this layout to be used for everything?
I have tried other distros but so far Gnome has the best and most reliable OSK. I have tried using a mouse for copy and paste functions but it doesn’t work in all applications.
OMG, please whatever you do, don’t start hacking system files and libgnome-shell.so!
That is a recipe for a broken desktop or having your changes wiped on the very next apt upgrade.
In GNOME on Wayland, you never need to touch compiled C libraries for this. The standard, safe way is using a GNOME Shell extension.
Thanks for the great replies and information. I now understand how it works and why. I’ll take a look at Improved OSK but it looks like development stopped with Gnome 44 and may not work. I’ll try later. Thanks again!
Isn’t that what extensions actually do ? AFAIK they monkey-patch the existing shell code to extend or suppress existing features (which is for example the reason we do not allow classic snaps with gnome extensions in the snap store)
Yes, true! But my point was about hacking files on disk. The earlier post suggested unpacking and modifying libgnome-shell.so directly. That gets wiped on the first apt upgrade and can leave a user with a broken desktop. With extensions you can at least recover easily.
Not really. Extensions can only work with information explicitly exported by GNOME Shell. Extensions can not modify the low level code or access anything that was not designed to be accessed.
The extension mentioned earlier unregisters the standard layouts and registers its own layouts, but it can do it because GNOME Shell already allows to do it (and effectively invokes the same functions on startup, just using the built-in resources), not because it modifies some code or GNOME Shell resources directly.
