I have been using my Librem 5 for more productive tasks (e.g. software development), and it’s great to implement a quick feature or fix a bug on the go.
A pocket keyboard that I could take along with my phone could add a lot to the experience. Is anyone else using something like that?
Would be very interested in the suggestion for this. Something like the N900 would be super ideal.
Or would something like the pinephone keyboard be more ideal?
as the bodies are different between the two phones I’m not sure about the fit. If it fits, I think that would be ideal. Build quality is my concern with Pine products though.
Beyond this, I don’t believe PureOS has the drivers to support this. The Librem 5 also doesn’t have the pins exposed as well. So while this would be awesome, we would need Purism to get in touch and have it engineered for the Librem 5.
One last thing though is that this implies the phone would be used in landscape. To date, I have never used the phone like that, and I am not really sure it would work well.
Yes, I am fairly certain the pinephone keyboard won’t work for the Librem 5. The pinephone has pins on its back for connecting accessories that the Librem 5 doesn’t have. But maybe there is a good solution out there with similar size.
EDIT: posted this before reading above comment
Here are some interesting options. I might try one of these (in order of increasing size):
I mean this does exist…
I have used several bluetooth keyboards and they “just work”, along with my bluetooth mouse so I see no reason any other bluetooth keyboard/mouse wouldn’t work.
See also: Tested Accessories · Wiki · Librem5 / Librem 5 Community Wiki · GitLab
You might want to clarify whether you want a USB keyboard or a Bluetooth keyboard or are open to either providing that it works.
Thanks for that. I’d forgotten that page.
I decided to order this one that I posted above:
(Miniature Keyboard- Microcontroller-Friendly PS/2 and USB | The Pi Hut)
I prefer the reliability and responsiveness of a corded connection. I’ll report back how it goes.
I’m thinking: Velcroed to the back of the L5; pop off the back whenever you need to type.
Cool.
(Hope your claws aren’t as long as that hand-model’s!)
Report back including the USB vendor id and product id, so that I can add it to that Wiki page?
There are also 2.4GHz wireless (not bluetooth) keyboards. I prefer those over bluetooth for desktop use. They require a dongle, and might also require a USB-C to USB-A adapter, between wired and blurtooth for convenience.
It works great in landscape… as long as Squeekboard is down. 
I have an old Apple bluetooth keyboard and it works remarkably well. A mouse would be nice, though.
I have used the Librem 5 really often in landscape mode and in general (not about Librem 5) I like landscape over portrait, if I want to do something more than just calling or texting.
In general landscape works as portrait view does. It has some issues, but one of them is gone with physical keyboard: vertical space. You don’t need any OSK to type, so landscape is much better in this case. I know it, because I use physical keyboards from desktop PC and hide OSK for that.
What me concerns more is that Purism does not want to support a real landscape mode, because they want to follow the GNOME philosophy that does not entirely work for such little devices in my mind. That means that they don’t want to add a specific landscape layout and just want to scale the portrait view. Turn your phone into portrait view and you see how ugly “desktop” and notification panel is. But ugly does not mean unusable. So, you’re still able to use it as on portrait view.
I see 2 issues with Pinephones keyboard solution:
These are different pins. That means you have to reroute them yourself to match the Pinephone keyboard case. And I’m sure it still wont fit to L5 case.
On 6.5 kernel there is a very annoying bug that happens to one of my keyboards (it works, but put ppc in a very buggy state). It’s maybe fixed on 6.6, but I need to test it first. So there are reasons that things doesn’t work. But let’s say - nothing that cannot be fixed.
Yes, there are keyboards that come with a random dongle (including e.g. Logitech with their so-called Unifying Receiver). Sometimes you can’t be sure whether the included dongle actually is a Bluetooth dongle, and is only provided for those host computers that don’t have Bluetooth capability or that do have Bluetooth capability but the Bluetooth that the host has is not compatible with the keyboard.
As you say, for the Librem 5, not so great because you will likely need a USB-C to USB-A adapter.
One advantage of the random dongle is that it can work in the early boot even when the early boot does not have support for Bluetooth (since the dongle usually just presents as a USB keyboard and/or mouse).
Another advantage is that the dongle and the keyboard are often pre-paired. So no need to stuff around with a pairing process.
One disadvantage is the often proprietary nature of the dongle. It is even less auditable for security (maybe home brew on-the-air security) and you may be dependent on that one vendor. (So if you lose the dongle and in the meantime the vendor has disappeared or that model of dongle has been phased out, you now have a useless keyboard.)
(Adding: Another disadvantage is that you tie up a USB port “unnecessarily”.)
All that said, yep, that is a third option - and I have all three. (I am not certain that I have tested e.g. the Logitech Unifying Receiver with the Librem 5 but I know that said dongle works with Raspbian on a Pi.)
So, I’ve tried a couple bluetooth keyboards with my L5 – they both work.
A bluetooth mouse just arrived… and it works! The thing is, when I connect the mouse, the keyboard disconnects… and visa versa.
Is this normal?
Is there a Remedy?
Unfortunately both of my Bluetooth keyboards, which “just work”, have built-in trackpads (which usually present as a mouse). So I’ve never tried a Bluetooth mouse. But the keyboard and trackpad do work together.
Not in my experience, for me I can have several bluetooth keyboards and mice connected at once without disconnecting each other.
Good questions and sorry that I did not explain before.
A real landscape mode would not just rotate the elements 90° (to be readable and top-down-organized), it would make use of the different ratio. For example you have a top panel on portrait view, that fits perfectly. You rotate it to landscape mode and things are just horizontal centered, not scaled to the left and right edges (which itself is also not so good) or reorganized in another way. That means:
a) Left and right is a lot of unused screen space.
b) You only see half the amount of context compared to portrait view, which also means you have to scroll much more.
A real landscape mode would reorganize it that there is no empty space and that the interaction feels as natural as it feels on portrait view. Here is my own creation (just Gimp edits) as example for top panel. On a full top panel you get 2 scrollboxes - one for quick settings and one for everything else, which can be read and used easily. I don’t think it has to look like this, but that it should make use of the available space in similar quality.
This was just a little example. But it shows the principle very well. On other parts the advantage can be bigger. The current plan seems not to changing the order of elements for landscape, because it brings more complexity in code. The reason is that devs don’t see any point why a phone should be used on landscape mode other than watching videos or playing games. But those things can be realized in fullscreen mode (which they want to improve). But it doesn’t match other use cases where people want to work something without docked mode.
And just to be said, similar improvements could be applied to all Phosh screens, not just top panel. The 2 things that are not GNOME philosophy conform:
So in fact, nearly any really good landscape is impossible on Phosh. I don’t think we will ever get to a point where it feels good without a downstream fork.
