Use built-in Windows touch keyboard

[FantasyTeddy]

The popup keyboard that is currently used supports 3 keyboard layouts: default (English), "fr" (French) & "de" (German).

Bildschirmaufnahme.2025-01-05.102830.mp4

While this works fine for the existing layouts, adding additional keyboard layouts is not trivial and would require a lot of manual work.

Windows has built-in support for a touch keyboard since Windows 10, if it is enabled in the settings.
By using the built-in version instead of the custom keyboard, support for any additional keyboard layout is automatically provided by Windows.

Bildschirmaufnahme.2025-01-05.103206.mp4

[richardklasens]

It doesn’t hide when you press enter :)

[FantasyTeddy]

That's true and it has to do with the control (TextBox) not loosing focus after pressing enter.
This could be solved in several ways:

• Define an explicit action when pressing Enter (like executing the save)
• Force the control to loose focus when Enter is pressed

[lansalot]

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

class SoftKeyboardCloser
{
    [DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
    private static extern bool PostMessage(IntPtr hWnd, uint Msg, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam);

    private const uint WM_SYSCOMMAND = 0x0112;
    private const int SC_CLOSE = 0xF060;

    static void CloseTouchKeyboard()
    {
        foreach (Process process in Process.GetProcessesByName("TabTip"))
        {
            IntPtr hWnd = process.MainWindowHandle;

            if (hWnd != IntPtr.Zero)
            {
                PostMessage(hWnd, WM_SYSCOMMAND, (IntPtr)SC_CLOSE, IntPtr.Zero);
                Console.WriteLine("Touch Keyboard closed.");
            }
        }
    }

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        CloseTouchKeyboard();
    }
}

Not tried it yet tho - and asking the process to close seems a little harsh, but maybe that's the way it works? Spawns a new tabtip.exe each time the keyboard pops up?

[FantasyTeddy]

Thanks for the code snippet. If we're actually going this route, this would certainly become useful.

[lansalot]

It would solve a lot of problems other than regionalisation too - I often find that setting the keyboard to pop up if no real keyboard connected sometimes fails (talking about windows here, not AOG). Edge seems to have a particularly hard time sometimes. So having this be the default for AOG too means no overlapping, and a lot less inconsistencies too (some of the popup keyboard won't take real keyboard input, I noticed, if you're on a full PC).

[lansalot]

https://gist.github.com/lansalot/b531274a7441a113da7dab879b1db57e

Had a play with this - the keyboard closes anyway when you return to doing stuff on the form behind.

[Pat-I]

Whatever you do don't ditch the AOG keyboard. the windows keyboard is a pain in the a** as it moves windows or hide the text zone.

[lansalot]

Do you have an example of this in practice with AOG? I tend to let mine pop up all the time on my dev tablet, but for customers, I disable it on the assumption they won't need it for anything outside of AOG. I can't remember it causing me a problem obscuring anything, but I could be wrong ofc :)

[FantasyTeddy]

Okay, if that's the case we don't need to do any changes: the AOG keyboard is already optional (can be configured) and if the correct Windows settings are applied, the touch keyboard will appear.

Any chance that we could work around the problems you mention? Because my initial intention was to get rid of the integrated AOG keyboard.

[lansalot]

Forgot I could turn AOG keyboard off - so just did. A quick test and I notice the nudge dialog still insists on the AOG numeric keypad to enter the distance. That would be easy enough to honour the disable, I suppose. I did look for a way to call tabtip with certain styles (eg numeric, IP address etc), but not found yet.

[FantasyTeddy]

I think for numeric input the existing numpad is the better option and we could leave this one. Of course we would need to find a way to disable the touch keyboard for these inputs.