virtualKeyboard

An on-screen keyboard for DankMaterialShell, in the shape of the one in end-4's dots-hyprland. It docks to the bottom of the screen, types into whatever has focus through ydotool, and pins out into a movable window when the docked position is in the way.

Pin it and the same keyboard becomes an ordinary floating window — draggable, stackable, closable from its own titlebar:

Credits

The design is end-4's, from dots-hyprland (GPL-3.0) — the layout, the key shapes, the docked card and the pin-to-float idea are all theirs, and this plugin's US QWERTY table is a port of their layouts.js "English (US)" entry. Their dotfiles are worth a look regardless of whether you run DMS.

Porting their tables makes this plugin a derivative work, which is why this repo is GPL-3.0 rather than MIT.

How it types

Keys are injected as raw Linux input events through ydotool, not as Wayland text input. That means it types into anything the focused window would accept from a physical keyboard — terminals, games, password prompts, Ctrl/Alt combos included — rather than only into applications that implement a text-input protocol.

The consequence is that ydotoold has to be running and your user has to be able to reach its socket. The plugin's startup check refuses to load without ydotool on PATH and says so in the shell.

Modifiers latch rather than requiring two hands: tapping Shift arms it for the next key, tapping it twice in quick succession caps-locks it, and Ctrl, Alt and Menu stay held until pressed again or until the keyboard closes. Number and symbol keys print their shifted character in the corner, the way a physical keycap does.

Install

Requires DMS ≥ 1.5.0 and ydotool. The plugin itself is QML and JavaScript — no build step, and it references no path above its own root.

Any distro, from the DMS plugin registry:

dms plugins install virtualKeyboard

Then enable it in DMS: Mod+, → Plugins → enable Virtual Keyboard.

ydotool

Install ydotool from your distro (ydotool on Arch and Fedora, ydotool + ydotoold on Debian/Ubuntu), then start its daemon:

systemctl --user enable --now ydotool     # or `ydotoold` — the unit name varies

Some distros ship ydotoold as a system service instead, with its socket at a fixed path. When it is not the default $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/.ydotool_socket, point YDOTOOL_SOCKET at the real one in the environment DMS itself runs in — the plugin spawns plain ydotool, which reads that variable:

systemctl --user set-environment YDOTOOL_SOCKET=/run/ydotoold.socket

Check it works before blaming the plugin:

ydotool key 30:1 30:0   # types `a` into the focused window

NixOS, via home-manager

# flake.nix
inputs.dms-plugins.url = "github:sitolam/dms-plugins";

programs.dank-material-shell.plugins.virtualKeyboard = {
  enable = true;
  src = inputs.dms-plugins.packages.${pkgs.system}.virtualkeyboard;
};

programs.ydotool.enable = true;   # system-level: starts ydotoold

# ydotoold's socket is not the per-user default, so tell DMS where it is.
systemd.user.services.dms.Service.Environment = [
  "YDOTOOL_SOCKET=/run/ydotoold.socket"
];

Using it

The plugin has no default keybind — it exposes IPC verbs, and your compositor decides what opens it:

dms ipc call virtualKeyboard toggle
dms ipc call virtualKeyboard open
dms ipc call virtualKeyboard close

niri — ~/.config/niri/config.kdl:

binds {
    Mod+Shift+K { spawn "dms" "ipc" "call" "virtualKeyboard" "toggle"; }
}

Hyprland — ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf:

bind = SUPER SHIFT, K, exec, dms ipc call virtualKeyboard toggle

There is also an optional DankBar pill (enable the plugin's widget in Mod+, → DankBar): a keyboard icon that lights up while the keyboard is open and toggles it on click. On a touchscreen that is the only way in, since a keybind needs a keyboard to press.

The two buttons on the left edge of the card are pin and hide:

button	effect
pin	swap between docked at the bottom and a floating window
hide	close the keyboard (Escape does the same while docked)

While floating, dragging the empty padding around the buttons moves the window — the compositor moves it natively, so tiling rules, snapping and workspaces all behave as they do for any other window.

Settings

Mod+, → Plugins → Virtual Keyboard:

setting	default	effect
Float by default	off	open as a floating window rather than docked

Notes

• The docked window sets exclusiveZone: 0, so it overlays the bottom of the screen rather than shrinking everything above it. Windows do not reflow when it opens, and a maximized window's last rows can end up behind it — pin it if that is in the way.
• Only US QWERTY ships today. The layout is plain data in layout-us.js: rows of {keytype, label, labelShift, shape, keycode}, with keycodes from linux/input-event-codes.h.
• Modifiers held by the keyboard are released when it closes, so a crash or a hasty close cannot leave Ctrl stuck down.

Development

nix develop
qmltestrunner -input plugins/virtualkeyboard/tests/tst_keyshape.qml
qmltestrunner -input plugins/virtualkeyboard/tests/tst_layout_us.qml
nix flake check    # both suites, headless

qmltestrunner takes one -input file per run, and its exit code is the failure count rather than a flat 1.

License

GPL-3.0-only — see ../../LICENSE.