Building

Depends (not yet exhaustive):

• wayland-protocols
• wayland-scanner
• libwayland-client
• pango
• cairo
• zig-wayland (provided as a git submodule)

Build dependencies:

• zig 0.9 or 0.8

NOTE: to use zig 0.8 zig-wayland needs to be pinned to 38b5de89b3e3de670bb2496de56e5173d626fad5

git submodule update --init
zig build

Usage

The entire system can be run with the following. This supports both swipe-typing and prediction based on the current word.

wvkbd-mobintl -O | ./scripts/manager.sh

Note that currently only applications that that support the text_input_v3 protocol are supported, I've been using gedit for testing. Also for this to be fully correct wvkbd needs to be patched to only output typed characters to stdout, and not attempt to send them to the compositor.

Using the selector for just wvkbd swipe-typing

The selector program in this repository can be used as a menu for swype-typing with wvkbd.

wvkbd-mobintl -O -L 240 |\
  swipeguess wordsSorted.txt 20 |\
  stdbuf -oL sed -e 's/^/\x1Bclear\n/g' -e 's/\t/\n/g' |\
  ./zig-out/bin/selector |\
  completelyTypeWord.sh

Architecture

The basic architecture I've been designing this for involves a "manager" process that receives events from the keybaord, predicts text, and sends that to the input-method process.

The input-method process would then communicate text to insert to the compositor, and provide the current word(s) to the manager. Currently the manager and input-method elements are both in the input-method binary, I intend to separate the manager to a shell script.

         input method <-> compositor
              ^
              |
              v
keyboard -> manager <--╮
              |        |--> train the predictor
              v        |
          predict -> select

Input Method Binary

The input-method binary acts as a proxy between the input-method protocol, and unix pipes. Given that it will need to support several different protocols in wayland, I expect it should be possible to also add xorg support to it.

In Scope:

• provide current word
• provide surrounding words
• provide input field type
• send selected text to the compositor
• change the current word (for autocorrect)
• send partial words, only possible sometimes (with input-method but not virtual-keyboard)
• other display protocols, it already needs two for wayland
• open the keyboard when a text input is selected

Possibly in Scope:

• provide cursor / selection
• intercept hardware keyboard input (hopefully not)

Out of Scope:

• handling keyboard input differently in some cases, like for gesture typing
• predicting words
• correcting words
• gui

Contributing

If you have a patch you'd like included you can send it to ~aren/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht