Next release of Phosh is not out yet. However, there is a change I’m sure people will ask about, so I want to share it before people ask questions. The bottom bar shrinks to 3/8 height of what it is currently. Because of this, the keyboard button has no space anymore.
That’s the reason why the whole bottom bar is the new OSK button. That’s the first point you’re maybe confused about. The second point is even more tricky. While it was just a short touch to show or hide the OSK, now you need to press long on bottom bar. This should prevent from getting closed by mistake, if you just want to hit the space bar for example. I hope that will help you as soon as the new version will be released.
… I’m not sure if I am happy about. Shrinking the bar is fine I guess, but I’m afraid of the long press solution. As someone who’s using this button quiet often I need a smooth workflow. Right now I did not test it, but my brain tells me that it will feel like a bubble gum and slows down a thing that should just work as fast as possible. I hope I’m wrong.
Definitely doesnt sound like a good change. I think maybe making the left and right sides of the bar a gesture zone to open and close the keyboard would be a better idea.
Than you want to hit the enter key and hide the keyboard by mistake. My idea is to open OSK via short touch, close via long press (1 finger solution) or alternatively close via 2 fingers short touch. I’m writing with second hand anyway and so I have 2 fingers to do so.
If I’m not wrong it’s a patch done by someone else than Purism devs. It improves landscape mode (more horizontal space for other things), what I really like about.
And since Phosh follows the GNOME philosophy I’m sure they wont add settings for this.
Package: phosh
Version: 0.34.0-1
Severity: grave
There's a regression in phosh 0.34.0 that prevents the button to
manually unfold the OSK after startup. Let's block testing migration
as this makes many apps unusable for some people.
Likely fixed via https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phosh/-/merge_requests/1332
-- Guido
-- System Information:
Debian Release: trixie/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental-debug'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: arm64
Kernel: Linux 6.5.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/12 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
Versions of packages phosh depends on:
ii dconf-gsettings-backend [gsettings-backend] 0.40.0-4
ii fonts-lato 2.015-1
ii gnome-shell-common 44.5-2
ii gsettings-desktop-schemas 45.0-2
ii libc6 2.37-12
ii libcairo2 1.18.0-1
ii libcallaudio-0-1 0.1.9-1
ii libecal-2.0-2 3.50.1-1
ii libedataserver-1.2-27 3.50.1-1
ii libfeedback-0.0-0 0.2.1-1
ii libfribidi0 1.0.13-3
ii libgcr-base-3-1 3.41.1-3
ii libgcr-ui-3-1 3.41.1-3
ii libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0 2.42.10+dfsg-3
ii libglib2.0-0 2.78.1-4
ii libgnome-desktop-3-20 44.0-2
ii libgtk-3-0 3.24.38-6
ii libgudev-1.0-0 238-3
ii libhandy-1-0 1.8.2-3
ii libical3 3.0.17-1
ii libjson-glib-1.0-0 1.8.0-2
ii libnm0 1.44.2-3
ii libpam0g 1.5.2-9.1
ii libpango-1.0-0 1.51.0+ds-3
ii libpolkit-agent-1-0 123-3
ii libpolkit-gobject-1-0 123-3
ii libpulse-mainloop-glib0 16.1+dfsg1-2+b1
ii libpulse0 16.1+dfsg1-2+b1
ii libsecret-1-0 0.21.1-1
ii libsystemd0 254.5-1
ii libupower-glib3 1.90.2-6
ii libwayland-client0 1.22.0-2.1
ii phoc 0.34.0~beta1+ds-2~exp1
Versions of packages phosh recommends:
ii feedbackd 0.2.1-1
ii gnome-session-bin 45.0-2
ii gnome-session-common 45.0-2
ii gnome-settings-daemon 45.0-1
ii iio-sensor-proxy 3.5-1
ii phosh-mobile-tweaks 0.33.0-1
ii phosh-osk-stub 0.34.0-1
ii phosh-plugins 0.34.0-1
ii slurp 1.4.0-1
ii squeekboard 1.22.0-5
phosh suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information
I am actually kind of ok with the long-press idea, as there are very few apps I use that don’t handle hiding/showing the OSK properly. Those apps are generally either Chromium/Electron based apps, or Qt based apps like PureMaps.
Pretty much everything else, I wouldn’t even need to bother with the long-press much.
I am more likely to accidentally bump the OSK button with my thumb, the way it is now.
Of course though, exposing this as a setting, even if only a gsetting option, would be a good move.
It’s not just about how apps handle it. Sometimes you just want to show or hide it. For example you want to read something on text-editor, so you hide OSK. Than you decide to write something and you enable it. Or you want to use a keyboard shortcut and open OSK to hide it after that shortcut. Of course it depends a lot of users and how they interact with apps etc. But that’s why I didn’t say “replace long press”, but “add an alternative as second way to interact” in post 3.
I absolutely agree with you in case I would be someone who just types something when there is a textbox which auto-open OSK and auto-close afterwards. But that’s just one use case of many.
That comes with 0.35. It had a little delay and was not ready on time. The whole bottom bar will look different. You will see the change without asking apt list.
While in contrast others (including me) are running this modification for 9 months on a daily basis as this was part of phosh-next since quite some time (make nav-bar small and add long press gesture for OSK keyboard (!1206) · Merge requests · World / Phosh / phosh · GitLab) and I came quite to like it. The additional screen space (including additional space in the overview) is quiet a win and the long press is hardly ever used. I find it even a bit easier to hit than the button and it has immediate visual feedback via a CSS animation while before I found myself hitting the old osk button and wonder: “did I hit it” when nothing happened making it in face slower than long press in those situations.
We will see. I did not say I hate it, just that I’m not sure about it yet. I have sensitivity for such things, but that does not mean I’m always right on that. And sorry that I don’t trust you in this case until I could test it by myself. It’s nothing personal, just my experience, that different people require different refinement level.
I like that smaller bar in general and you also saw my design work, which had same size and same visuals. So this was never an issue to me.
It sounds like disabling swipe-typing on OSK, which would slow down writing and similar actions. For example I write red in one single swipe or like copy-paste a file in nautilus (quick backup) via Ctrl and swipe from c to v. Does it work as it sounds or is the plan kinda different?
Of course. But long press would interfere with the advanced app switcher, in case this is something the Phosh team wants to implement.
I may misread or misinterpret something, but wrote from begin on “or later” (see title).
With Byzantium being in deep maintenance mode updates mostly happen because someone (often the upstream authors) want to make it available to users nevertheless. This involves figuring out how to support Byznatium’s old baseline and doing the necessary testing. So with most of these things it depends on somebody using their free time to update it.
