Alternative Ortholinear keyboard layouts for the onboard virtual keyboard.

I have created a two ortholinear, compact keyboards for Onboard the virtual on screen keyboard for linux, primarily used by gnome as evidenced by it's lack of readily available documentation. Said documentation is available via yelp if you know where the doc lives or via gnome help if you have it.

In addition there is one intermediate QWERTY layout that I created on my way to a fully ortholinear dvorak keyboard. I'm not particularly interested in QWERTY keyboards, but if you are, there are two. One with the original number layer, and one called Planck that has the same number layer as the dvorak layout.

@Iomky has created another repo which has a layout for typing zhuyin via a virtual keyboard in the i3wm environment.

The nice keyboards here are Planck and Dvorak both are compact ortholinear keyboards with most of the important keys where your thumbs go.

These keyboards are more compact with more features than the compact keyboards that come with onboard.

Both have a numbers and symbols layer which is a full layer, with F-keys, a keypad, multiple arrows and most of the symbols on the left hand.

They could use some tweaking, but they are reasonably good layouts. Maybe someday, a better ergodox layout would be nice. These are a good start.

To Do

There's always something. The Mouse keys pop up in a very strange place which I have not yet been able to change. I have no clue why. It doesn't seem to matter where I physically place them in the SVG.

Installing these keyboard layouts.

• clone this repo,
• make install

This will copy them to ~/.local/share/onboard/layouts

Where you can then edit, tweak and change them all you want.

Editing, or creating your own layouts

If you find yourself here because you want to make your own keyboard layout I can help a little.

To start, in the configuration of onboard, select New to create a new keyboard. Give it a name. This will create a copy of the currently selected keyboard layout in your home .local folder. ~/.local/share/onboard/layouts

Basically there is some SVG files, and a .onboard file for each layout. Each SVG file corresponds to a layer in the keyboard layout. All information about what the keys do is in the .onboard file which is XML.

Note that if a key isn't defined in the XML, it won't show up when you load your layout.

Also note that SVG is also an XML. So you can edit this all in your favorite editor if you like. Except that the id's between the two XML's are not human friendly unless you make them that way. None of the layouts that come with onboard are obvious, and they require you to remember 4 digit hex values because that's what they used for the id's.

Something that helps to some degree is that you can use Inkscape, sudo pacman -S inkscape, to edit the SVG files. This does ease some pain.

Onboard documentation.

It sucks. But there is some once you figure out where they hide it.

You can find html versions in the doc directory of this repo

In case you want to do it yourself...

yelp-build html <path to docs> will build the html for you.

In my case path to docs was /usr/share/help/C/onboard.

in any case you'll want to spend the 5 or less minutes it takes to read the doc.

There are some clues in there that will help get you going.

Just point your browser at the repository's onboard-keyboards/doc/index.html file.

or alternatively use gnome help if you have it. Or yelp <directory where the docs are>.