Qt 5 has a complete new interface for input methods. Instead of the old QInputContext (which is just a wrapper around the new system now) there is now QInputPanel and QPlatformInputContext (no documentation yet, see source), for the reasoning see QTBUG-20088 – Create proper input method abstraction and expose it through a public API in QTGui.
Luckily there is already a simple platform input context for the Maliit input method framework in the Qt code base available. There are some smaller bugs open, but they should be easy to fix. So it should be already possible to use Maliit with Qt 5 applications.
Additionally we would of course like to compile Maliit itself against Qt 5 too. Based on the previous work eliminating the X requirement in Maliit it was a quite easy task to compile it with Qt 5 and required just fixing some smaller bugs and updating some build system files.
After that I tried to run Maliit with the XCB platform. This showed an ugly bug, the virtual keyboard stole the focus from the application. On Qt 4 we used the WA_X11DoNotAcceptFocus Qt::WidgetAttribute which does not work for the XCB (and Xlib) platforms in Qt 5. I filed a bug about this issue and created a patch (which is sadly only visible when one has a gerrit account registered). With that patch applied to Qt 5 Maliit was basically working.
No screenshot?
I will blog more with screenshots soon.
Pingback: Jon Nordby » The Maliit buildbot
hi,
is there any where a complete description how to replace caribou in gnome3 by maliit?
I have installed as described on “https://wiki.maliit.org/Documentation/Installing#Ubuntu”, but how to run and how to configure?
Kind regards,
Christian (a German description would be nice, but not a must have)
I do not think there is currently a real end user documentation available.
Jan,
thanks for you reply. I have tried to use Gnome3 on my WeTab. It works great except the onscreen keyboard. Finding a good solution under Linux is not easy. I had tried to configure caribou by editing xml files to get a German layout, but then I recognised that it works not in any application. Then I tried the onboard binaries from Ubuntu, but these were unstable. After a self compiled try it is stable, but it does not appear while searching Gnome3 desktop search. So hope is maliit can do that?
Did you use maliit under Gnome3?
Christian
Hey Christian, the Gnome3 desktop search is indeed a pain point. It does not use the common infrastructure for input methods, so it’s hard to integrate any other input method system but the Caribou keyboard in Gnome3 :-/