On the 770 you were able to toggle the onscreen thumb keyboard by pressing the 'rocker' key, ie the center of the d-pad. This does not seem to work on the n810. Pressing on the input area with a thumb or pad of finger does nothing either, regardless of 'stylus input method' settings in Control Panel.

I'm wanting to assign a hardware key shortcut to open the onscreen thumb keyboard. How is this possible? Via gconf? Or DBus? Or...? hildon-input-method call? Anybody with a little coding experience that could point me in the right direction?

Well I used the gconf editor to change
/apps/osso/inputmethod/input_method_plugin
from 000_hildon_western_vkb to 000_hildon_western_fkb

..this made every click on an area with text input possible immediately bring up the finger keyboard. No more tiny stylus keyboard, ever! It only does this when the hardware keyboard is closed, which still isn't exactly what I wanted.

It seems like making a shortcut could be done with matchbox-remote, but I can't figure it out. Anyone?

This is pissing me off all over again. Still no input, anyone?

If I understand you, you want the thumb keyboard to pop up if you touch the screen a certain way. Try a quick tap in the input part of the screen with the tips of two fingers close together or with one finger do a double tap (quick).

Thanks, but what im really seeking is a way via command line to pop the thumb keyboard open.

I'm not quite following your request, gogol.

Are you asking for your setup to work while your physical keyboard is open?

If so, maybe trick the tablet to believe that it's closed.

Either:
gconftool -t bool -s /system/osso/af/slide-open false
or
gconftool-2 -t bool -s /system/osso/af/keyboard-attached false

If you're looking for the keyboard to pop up whenever you want it to with a hardware button, you'll still need to have the cursor located at some place to input text anyway.

Are you asking for the same behavior VNCviewer does?

Clicking the middle D-Pad brings up the keyboard with this app.

When the hardware keyboard is open, whats the purpose of an onscreen keyboard?

When the hardware keyboard is closed, how do you open the finger keyboard? You can't, it requires pressing the rocker button which is on the hardware keyboard (??!)

It seems a basic UI design idiocy to me. Wouldnt you agree? There should be a way to set the tablet to use the thumb board _only_ (no stylus typing for me), and to only open when the hardware keyboard is shut. As it seems this cannot be done, I thought I would assign it to one of the other hardware keys perhaps through a shell script or mce.ini or something.

Thanks all for your responses.

Okay, I gotcha now.

I don't own a N810 so I wasn't quite sure all of what you were saying.

Can't you simply remap that rocker button from the keyboard to another hardware button like the center D-Pad?

Maybe take a look at this thread.
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...hlight=xmodmap

You can find out what the code is by installing Xev, which can be found here along with Xmodmap.
http://maemo.lancode.de/?path=./diablo/binary

Best of luck.

Its a good idea, but what I want to get away from is having to have the hardware keyboard open to toggle the onscreen keyboard. That defeats the purpose for me and seems so backwards its a bit embarrassing.

I guess I'll just put this in the "What The Hell Were They Thinking" pile.

*lol*

What am I even doing getting mixed up in a thread like this?

I've never even seen a N810.

I might have an idea for you to try.

Install Xkbd.

Run it while your hardware keyboard is close and only press the return key, nothing else.

Did that bring up your touch screen keyboard?

It will only work if the cursor is somewhere that can input text like Xterm, Notes, posting a message etc.

If that works, you can make your own Xkbd keyboard layout that has one button only with a code of "default_ks Return" and locate that button somewhere on the screen that's out of the way but easy to get to using the -geometry option.

I bet if you could Xmodmap edit the zoom key or something else as a "Return" key, that might actually launch the touch screen keyboard as well.

Post back if I confused you completely.