The KDE team wants your feedback on the new virtual keyboard coming to Plasma 6.5

Last month, in one of our "This Week in Plasma" coverages, we told you that the KDE team was working on a new virtual keyboard set to release with Plasma 6.1, which will eventually replace the current Maliit. This project was initiated by KDE developer Aleix Pol, who felt that it would be beneficial to develop an alternative using QtVirtualKeyboard.

The Plasma Virtual Keyboard, as it is called, has come a long way since then with better Wayland support, upgraded Qt and Frameworks dependencies, improved internationalization, and more. The KDE team has shared the most notable changes and wants your ideas and feedback on them.

First of all, you can now configure the width of the keyboard, so it can be centered instead of covering the entire screen. The keyboard's dimension calculations have also seen an overhaul. It can be set to take up a percentage of the screen height, defaulting to 30%, and horizontal margins get applied automatically if the width exceeds six times the height.

Number keys have finally been added to the top key row, so you won't have to switch to the symbols layout just to type a digit. There's also now sound and haptic feedback for key presses, and you can import layouts from Qt VirtualKeyboard to make changes for different locales.

A lot of bug fixes have been made, including fixing issues with overlapping text in some situations. The developers have also squashed bugs related to the keyboard's visible state, like when it failed to open or reopen correctly, and fixed incorrect capitalization after every word.

As for what's planned in the future, the KDE team says it is working on keyboard emulation. This will add support for modifier keys such as Tab, Meta, Esc, and Ctrl, along with the ability to emulate events such as Ctrl + C (copy).

A floating display mode, as seen in popular virtual keyboards like Gboard, is also in the works. This lets you detach the keyboard and move it anywhere.

Plasma Bigscreen users will find optimized settings for TVs, which also add options for selecting languages and toggling sound and vibration. Another planned feature is cursor navigation: holding the spacebar and then moving left or right will move the cursor in the text field.

As previously said, the KDE team wants your feedback and ideas on this; you can share them in this Discourse thread.

If you're in Berlin, you can drop by Akademy 2025, the 22nd edition of KDE's annual summit. It's free to attend and runs from September 6 to 11, giving you the chance to discuss your ideas in person with the developers.

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Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Tuesday 26 August 2025 at 5:53 am AEST (my time).

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