Mobile Keyboard

[Lev Dubinets <le...@live.com>]

I found that guacamole works well when connecting with a mobile phone, and I've been working on some interesting mobile use cases but found one blocking issue: there doesn't seem to be a way to get the iOS/android native keyboard to come up when clicking on a remote text field. Is there any way to get that to happen?

Lev

Re: Mobile Keyboard

[Mike Jumper <mj...@apache.org>]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 11:09 PM Lev Dubinets <le...@live.com> wrote:

> I found that guacamole works well when connecting with a mobile phone, and
> I've been working on some interesting mobile use cases but found one
> blocking issue: there doesn't seem to be a way to get the iOS/android
> native keyboard to come up when clicking on a remote text field. Is there
> any way to get that to happen?
>

No, not exactly. The primary issues here are:

1) Only the windowing system behind the remote desktop knows that's a text
field. Those semantics are lost over VNC/RDP and the text field may as well
be a painting of a text field.
2) Displaying the native mobile keyboard requires focusing a local input
field, and there are browser restrictions on when focus events can be fired
by JavaScript and actually have an effect.

Guacamole does already provide a means of typing using the native mobile
keyboard, though not automatic for the reasons listed above:
http://guacamole.apache.org/doc/gug/using-guacamole.html#text-input

Looking forward, there might be a way to recognize this heuristically,
perhaps by visually detecting when the mouse cursor turns into an "I" bar.
Only testing would reveal whether that would actually work well in
practice. As you can extend RDP through static virtual channels, and
Guacamole supports this, it would also be possible to write an application
that sits within the remote desktop and signals the client side when a text
field gains focus.

- Mike