On Screen Touch Keyboard

[Dannie Heinzen]

Its lovely, isn't it. It's the Windows 8 on-screen keyboard, except I don't need or want to see it. I have a Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch and it already has a keyboard. I will never ever want to use the Windows 8 touch keyboard. Unfortunately there is no checkbox or "just turn it off" way to disable the keyboard with a supported option.

This will of course, disable both the touch keyboard and handwriting service, so you'll lose handwriting recognition. This was totally worth it to me and has made my touch screen laptop experience much better, especially when I'm using the Full Screen Browser. I hope this helps! Note that if you have a touch only device, or a detachable keyboard, you could get yourself into a tough spot without an on-screen keyboard, so just have your mouse ready and a plan to turn this service back on if you get in trouble. ;) If you're having any other problems with Windows 8, I encourage you to check out my simple "Windows 8 Missing Instruction Manual" blog post and YouTube video. It's helped a lot of people and could help you!

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

We have enabled "Automatically show the touch keyboard in windowed apps when there's no keyboard attached to your device." in the typing settings and during normal operation, this is what we require.Whenever the user uses the touch input to focus control that accepts text, the touch keyboard is shown. If he uses mouse or keyboard, it stays hidden.

However, on the Login or Lock Screen, no keyboard is shown. A worse one may be manually shown using the Ease of Access settings, but this is not something that the user should need to do on every login. Can we get the same behaviour at the Login Screen as later in the OS?

Windows 10 has so many bugs. Sometimes,we have to find a third party software solution.For your situation, I recommend a software named 'Tabtip on-demand',a good software developed by a Swiss developer. Here's an overview from their own site:

Tabtip On-Demand is a great tool for mobile users with Tablet PC which adds the missing keyboard on-demand functionality to the WIndows input panel. It is also able to scroll web pages and push input fields into view, thus the text are typing is never hidden behind the keyboard. Tabtip On-Demand also makes the keyboard available by mouse click (optional) on the desktop as well as in the Modern UI (Windows 8 and above).

Personally, I think it is useful; you can forget it once you start it. You can always make setting by clicking its icon at right menu corner. It has two modes: Tabtip mode and OSK mode. However, it cannot always pop up in some special text field(for example,text field of Google), then you have to start keyboard manually.

When sddm starts (either on boot, or after logging out) it blocks the screen with a large on-screen keyboard (the rest of the screen is black), and I cannot get rid of the keyboard without clicking the "hide keyboard" 'key' with the mouse, after which the sddm login screen appears. Although I can understand that there might be accessibility reasons for this, I can see no way to switch this off (I am the only user of this computer), so it is rather annoying.

Is there a way to prevent this on-screen keyboard from appearing unrequested, or, alternatively, would KDE actually work quite happily with gdm3 as the login screen manager (or another manager, such as lightdm) instead?

First up, don't try another display manager with Plasma. I was using another one until recently and my sytem (Ubuntu 20.04 server) was stalling on boot. I had to put it to sleep and then wake it to get a login screen. I switched to sddm and solved that problem immediately (also clearing an error with notifications in the Plasma GUI), only to be confronted with the annoying on screen keyboard.

Everything online said there should be a configuration file, sddm.conf, in /etc/. They said you should find the line that starts with InputMethod= and make sure there is nothing after the equals sign. On my system, there was no such file.

Now, right under whatever is the last entry in your General group, add the setting InputMethod=. You can optionally add the comments shown in the example below above this line for future reference. I included a link to this answer, explaining the line's necessity, for additional info. I did this in case you encounter this file and its change at some time in the distant future, probably while upgrading your Linux distro or some package which wants to reset this file, by which point you will have likely forgotten all of this and the reason why you made this change - it happens to all of us:

Log out and test by trying to reenter your username and password, hopefully without that annoying gratuitous on-screen keyboard popping up and obscuring the entire Login screen, including the field you are trying to populate - an excellent example of horrible UI design.

Shout, "Finally!", and get on with whatever task you were trying to do before encountering this frustration and winding up here in askubuntu (e.g., updating your SDDM Login theme and getting hijacked by this keyboard gremlin).

Since Ignition doesn't have a built-in onscreen keyboard, we're reliant on the Windows OSK when using touch screens (which is the majority of e.g. food & beverage manufacturers with hygienic environments). Usually I'm running Windows 10 IOT which has a setting for "display the on-screen keyboard when no keyboard is connected", which automatically pops up (and hides) a keyboard when text entry fields are selected.

Due to hardware procurement lead-times we've been forced to use an interim machine which came pre-installed with Windows 11, and it doesn't have the same setting. It does have some settings related to the on-screen keyboard, but none of them make the keyboard behave the way I described. I don't want the on-screen keyboard permanently shown; it takes up half the screen and is only used 5% of the time.

I can set the application to run in windowed mode and direct the operators to tap the on-screen keyboard on the taskbar, but (a) that's just an extra step which is less the ideal, and (b) the customer would prefer that we have a full-screen app with no access to the taskbar.

I have a Windows 11 laptop that folds all the way back to a tablet-like mode. When I go to a text entry screen on a web browser, the on screen keyboard opens up automatically. I do not have Perspective Workstation. I can resize the keyboard and I can close it out. The taskbar doesn't even show the keyboard icon in this case.

Any chance you can post a couple of screenshots of how it looks for you? In Windows 10 the tablet mode keyboard is quite different to the general on-screen keyboard, I'm interested if the same applies in Windows 11. Might help me get the settings right.

When my computer detects no keyboard (flip the monitor over), the taskbar also goes away. When I select an input field, the keyboard pops up. The circle can change the keyboard from floating to fixed. The keyboard always automatically appeared and disappeared. You can change the keyboard type using settings.

The tablet mode is still built into Windows 11 since there are references to tablets. I don't know what triggers it though. My laptop keyboard does appear to disable itself when the monitor is flipped over. I assume you are doing all of your tests without a keyboard? Is there anything that is connected to your computer that might make the computer seem like a keyboard is connected (any USB devices)?

I found a few more settings:

Settings...Personalization...Taskbar...Optimize taskbar for touch interactions when this device is used as a tablet

Settings...Personalization...Text Input...Touch Keyboard

There is no dedicated option to enable or disable Tablet mode in Windows 11. Tablet mode in Windows 11 is automatically enabled, for this your laptop model must be a touchscreen device or a 2-in-1 PC.

Try this on your system. This worked on my laptop immediately (without turning it over).

It did not work while using VNC to connect to a headless Windows 11 desktop. If you are testing by remote desktop or VNC, there's a chance that is causing issues.

There's a lot of sites including Zebra and Intel that go over ConvertibleSlateMode. If this doesn't work by itself, there might be other settings that work with it that will do what you want. Look at the Tablet mode link and under the Unattend Settings section.

Calibration via the PenMount application (Advantech drivers) works, but tapping on the screen (again, with VNC connected or disconnected) doesn't do anything, and tapping on the crosshairs on the calibration screen likewise does nothing. It's as if the touchscreen isn't working at all, but it is - perhaps the installed driver is receiving the touch signals and blocking them from getting through to Windows?

I have had this issue consistently with the advantech panels. It's almost like the 'touch screen' is only a fancy mouse input. Best of luck with trying to get it working. I went through Advantech support with this issue and didn't get anywhere unfortunately. I'll be watching closely to see if you end up finding a solution.

I think you could be right on the money there. All the configuration settings very much lend themselves to the "this is a virtual mouse" picture, rather than the "this is a touch screen" picture. Well, that sucks. Other than that, Advantech has been a great touchscreen solution!

I had to completely remove the PenMount driver (uninstall it from Add and Remove programs, and force uninstall the device and it's driver from Device Manager), then reinstall it. During installation there's a popup asking if you want to use it in mouse mode. I clicked no, and immediately the OSK automatically appears when it should. As long as I'm not connected by Teamviewer or VNC.

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