RFE: Docking, shrink maximized windows when active

I'd quite like this as well. I've tried devilspie, but it doesn't do struts and I can't find anything similar that does. Cellwriter has a docking feature, but it doesn't work in metacity (besides, the keyboard isn't its main function--cellwriter is primarily for handwriting recognition, which is pretty much useless on the capacitive touchscreen of the Joggler I'm using--so I'd much rather use onboard anyway).

Regardless of whether there is an application that can set a strut and force another application's window into it (and I'd very much like to know if there is, please!), there would be advantages, from my perspective at least, to integrating docking into onboard:

 - While, in most cases, a docked keyboard would be most useful, many windows would be too tall to fit in the remaining screen space on some devices (such as the 800x480 display on the O2 Joggler). With integrated docking support, you could easily undock the onboard window when needed.

 - It would be easier for the user to set up.

 - It would be more reliable in terms of showing and hiding the window--the strut would definitely get set and unset each time.

 - The size of the window (and the strut) could be changed easily by the user. Also, with layout switching, this could potentially enable different layouts to set the window height dynamically--for example, a layout with only cursor and a few other navigation keys could set itself to be 2/5 of the height of the normal layout.

That's all I can think of for now.

Thanks,
Sam

Docking ability sounds good.

There was also a request to be able to dock Onboard to the left or right edge of the screen; to the bottom edge of the screen, stretching it to cover the whole width, without mentioning risizing the window around it or having Onboard slide in and out.
https://answers.launchpad.net/onboard/+question/151643

If this is going to be implemented, we have to consider the relation of this docking feature to the already available auto-show, auto-move and transparency features.

Yes, good point in #3, Francesco. I guess we'll have to decide what we want and what can actually be implemented across desktop environments. I'd still rather have both variants in one "docking" bug report for now, though.

Personally I'm in favor of investigating struts first (whenever that happens), i.e. shrinking the available desktop area while Onboard is visible.

Is it possible to embed onboard in something like gnome-panel with auto-hide functionality? I think it is a good way for providing onscreen keyboard like in Android.

Norbert, how should it embed into gnome-panel? Can you explain? Not saying we'll do that, but I've just started working on docking yesterday and am still exploring all the options.

I think we have most of the suggestions implemented by now. Onboard can optionally dock to a screen edge, struts can be set up to shrink the work area, it can be resized and moved. Moved either manually or by auto-show. Thanks everyone for the suggestions, if anything important is still missing, please let us know.

The fix is available in the the alpha 1 preview release of Onboard 0.99.0. Thus, I am marking this bug as Fix Released.

onboard (0.99.0~alpha1~tr1190-0ubuntu1) raring; urgency=low

  * New upstream alpha release. (LP: #1089396)
    + Fix Onboard becoming empty when system font dpi changes

 -- Francesco Fumanti <email address hidden> Wed, 12 Dec 2012 21:33:43 +0100

onboard (0.99.0~alpha1~tr1188-0ubuntu1) raring; urgency=low

  * Sponsorship request for Ubuntu Raring (LP: #1089396)
  * debian/control: raise virtkey run dependency to 0.63.0 or above
  * debian/patches: refresh patch and change default theme
  * Onboard requires now virtkey >= 0.63.0
  * Add example file with system defaults for the nexus7
  * Various changes to get acceptable speeds on the nexus7 (LP: #1070760)
  * Add docking feature (LP: #405034)
  * Add sliding feature for docking and auto-repositioning
  * Add multitouch support
  * Add a toggle to stop listening to touch events in case of many problems
  * Add popup on long press for key variants like diacritics
  * New option to choose popup vs repeat for keys with variants
  * New gsettings key for the popup delay
  * Make move, frame and touch handles work on the nexus7
  * Perform simulated clicks on correct touch position
  * Auto-release pointer grab after timeout in case nexus7 is unresponsive
  * Fix xserver memory leaking
  * Improve speed when typing and moving the pointer (LP: #1055448)
  * Fix rendering being slowed by emboss effect on keycaps (LP: #890221)
  * Fix for not being able to move/resize Onboard on touchscreens (LP: #959035)
  * Have Onboard respect launcher icon size (LP: #1078554)
  * Auto-show Onboard by clicking already selected text entries (LP: #1078602)
  * Make default shortcut for language/layout work from Onboard (LP: #1078629)
  * New design of the Preferences dialog with more options (LP: #1053496)
  * Disable click buttons when mousetweaks is not installed
  * Add D-Bus service to show and hide the keyboard (LP: 1032042)
  * Don't export dbus service for embedded instances
  * Set NumLock's default sticky behavior to LOCK_ONLY
  * Keep state of NumLock across restarts
  * New attribute in layout files for sticky key behaviour
  * New layout tags key_template and keysym_rule defining keysym-specific labels
  * New window tag for color schemes to define border of popups
  * New layout tag for language specific overrides in the layouts
  * Move common key definitions into template for import by layout files
  * Sync modifier states of Onboard with changes by hardware keyboard or tools
  * Fix keys not re-rendered when releasing latched modifiers (LP: #1069990)
  * Send key strokes for all modifiers (LP: #1067797)
  * Blacklist Ctrl-LAlt+Fn keys by default
  * Add alternative key generation by at-spi2
  * Try to improve struts handling for metacity and mutter
  * Fix getpreferredencoding hack, by Matthias Klose
  * Build for all python3 versions, by Matthias Klose
  * Add work arounds for some problems with the search box of firefox
  * Improve startup sequence to fix Onboard showing up sometime at position 0.0
  * Make scanning work out of the box on the nexus7
  * Small changes to...