I'm looking at porting over some text-based apps, specifically elinks. As a proof-of-concept, I've been using elinks successfully when ssh'd into my desktop Linux box. However, every time I click on something on the screen the virtual keyboard pops up (this is the default osso-xterm behavior). What I'd like to be able to do is suppress the virtual keyboard in osso-xterm, possibly through an escape sequence, and only turn it on when presenting an input field.

Thanks.

That's not the way to go about this problem, I think. Look at the vncviewer app it solves this very problem by only making the virtual keyboard available upon user demand -- they use the D-pad center key to do this. I can't explian exactly how they do this, but their code patches itself into the management of the hildon-input method... that is, you need to explicitly code an application to do this. You may want to look attheir source code to learn how it is done.

I too run text-based apps on xterm and wish for exactly what you asking. I do all my email with University of Washington's excellent email client Alpine... and having the keyboard popping up all the time and taking over a third of the screen is a pain. But that's how osso-xterm is coded... to do what you and I wish would mean hacking / recoding osso-xterm. This would be another solution.

Another solution would consiste of creating an xterm equivalent without hildon-input method support and rely instead on any of a variety of virtual keyboards used for X-based apps which don't have hildon-input method support.

Indeed, an approximation to this can be experienced as follows. It is actually possible to disable the hildon-input method... but the control is global. I quote,

"This solution doesn't selectively disabling the vkb, but
enabling/disabling the vkb/hwr system wide can be done by setting a
boolean value to this gconf key (note: IT2008 only).

/apps/osso/inputmethod/enable-stylus-im"

do it carefully, least you brick your system... you an do it via the line-mode gconf utility or via the gui-based gconf-editor... if you do this and use any of the virtual keyboards available you'l get what you want more of eless... but then switching back to other applications becomes a pain as you have to re-enable the vkb for them.

As for elinks, do take a look at http://pupnik.de/links2.html, a port of the links browser... they too deal with the problem of keyboard input.

-- Denis

rxvt builds straight up; it has (of course) no input method support, so it would work with a collapsible virtual keyboard.

Ok, so after looking through the source code for osso-xterm, it looks like my best route would be to modify elinks to call vte_terminal_new(), then fork and attach the child to the new terminal window. Second thing to do is look for each of the keyboard input routines in elinks, and have it pop up the input method when called (and remove the input method when done). Sounds simple enough (I'm just starting to learn GTK programming).

For those wondering, I found the docs for the vte library at: http://library.gnome.org/devel/vte/u...eTerminal.html