So after much hair pulling I contacted the author of the above mentioned Gnome extension and he set me on the right track (thank you):
1. Auto-summon of OSK only works with application/toolkit support. Text widgets in alien (non-Gnome or non-Gtk?) toolkits don't summon the OSK (Gnome, Firefox, Qt, whatever other toolkits; I don't know if this is even standardized by freedesktop.org. 2. Because of alien toolkits there is always a need to summon on demand. Since Gnome 3.28 in Ubuntu 18.04, you can summon on a touch screen by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. However, this ONLY works in a Wayland session, not in X. I can confirm that it does. None of this is described in the Gnome 3.28 release notes or the Ubuntu 18.04 help. These are clearly documentation bugs. 3. Judging by the confusion int his bug report and the many questions on Askubuntu,com, it seems that the swiping up eluded even those users who have access to the feature because they use Wayland. Quite clearly this is not sufficiently discoverable, which IMHO is a bug. (Of course this is not helped by the buggy docs) 4. The Gnome extension to summon on-demand (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1061/on-screen-keyboard-button/) does NOT work with touch in Ubuntu 18.04 (Gnome 3.28) according to the author, and neither does it in Cosmic (3.30). It works with the mouse but this is awkward to say the least. The author will hopefully be able to look into it but it may take some time. 5. I don't know why in Gnome 3.30 (Cosmic) the auto-summon only works for Activities and Applications menus search boxes, and not elsewhere in Gnome as far as I can find. Hard to believe that this is a bug in every Gnome application, maybe a Gtk bug? -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to gnome-shell in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1760399 Title: New On-screen keyboard cannot be manually triggered to appear Status in caribou package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Status in gnome-shell package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: I have always used an on-screen keyboard as a virtual keyboard for entering text in a different layout than my physical keyboard. This time I cannot, since I cannot manually trigger the new OSK. Steps: 1. Open Firefox 2. Try to enter text in a different layout using the new OSK 3. You cannot make the OSK appear When enabled, the new OSK appears automatically in Activities, but I cannot trigger it outside GNOME apps. You have to enable the new OSK first from Universal Access in Settings. I consider this a regression from 16.04 LTS, where On-board is easily triggered. Workaround: sudo apt install onboard ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04 Package: gnome-shell 3.28.0-0ubuntu2 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-13.14-generic 4.15.10 Uname: Linux 4.15.0-13-generic x86_64 ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu2 Architecture: amd64 CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME Date: Sun Apr 1 11:31:16 2018 DisplayManager: gdm3 InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-10-02 (180 days ago) InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" - Beta amd64 (20170930) SourcePackage: gnome-shell UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to bionic on 2018-03-27 (4 days ago) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/caribou/+bug/1760399/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
