Buffyboard is a touch-enabled on-screen keyboard running on the Linux framebuffer. It's primarily intended for vampire hunting[^1] but you can also use it as a general purpose keyboard.
Buffyboard uses [LVGL] for input processing and rendering. Key events are forwarded directly to the kernel via a uinput device. Since the latter emulates a hardware keyboard, the terminal keymap must match with buffyboard's layout or else on-screen keys might not produce the correct result.
We are en route to v1 which aims at providing a useable, visually pleasant application including [fbkeyboard]'s most essential features. For details about the current status, see the [v1 milestone]. You may also browse the full list of [open issues] to get an idea of what's planned beyond v1.
- On-screen keyboard control via mouse, trackpad or touchscreen
- Multi-layer keyboard layout including lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers and selected symbols (based on top three layers of [squeekboard's US terminal layout])
When pulling changes from the remote later, either use `git pull --recurse-submodules` or manually run `git submodule update` as needed after pulling.
Once you have the sources, you can build the app and run it in a VT. Unless your user account has special privileges, `sudo` will be needed to access input device files.
In order to work with [LVGL], fonts need to be converted to bitmaps, stored as C arrays. Unl0kr currently uses a combination of the [OpenSans] font for text and the [FontAwesome] font for pictograms. For both fonts only limited character ranges are included to reduce the binary size. To (re)generate the C file containing the combined font, run the following command
- Standard `LV_SYMBOL_*` glyphs (`0xF001,0xF008,0xF00B,0xF00C,0xF00D,0xF011,0xF013,0xF015,0xF019,0xF01C,0xF021,0xF026,0xF027,0xF028,0xF03E,0xF0E0,0xF304,0xF043,0xF048,0xF04B,0xF04C,0xF04D,0xF051,0xF052,0xF053,0xF054,0xF067,0xF068,0xF06E,0xF070,0xF071,0xF074,0xF077,0xF078,0xF079,0xF07B,0xF093,0xF095,0xF0C4,0xF0C5,0xF0C7,0xF0C9,0xF0E7,0xF0EA,0xF0F3,0xF11C,0xF124,0xF158,0xF1EB,0xF240,0xF241,0xF242,0xF243,0xF244,0xF287,0xF293,0xF2ED,0xF55A,0xF7C2,0xF8A2`)
Buffyboard uses [squeekboard layouts] converted to C via [squeek2lvgl]. To regenerate the layouts, ensure that you have pipenv installed (e.g. via `pip install --user pipenv`) and then run
Buffyboard is licensed under the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
[^1]: If you still don't know what vampires have to do with all of this, the train of thought is: Linux frame**buffer** 👉 **buffy**board 👉 ... wait for it ... 👉 [**Buffy** the Vampire Slayer]. There you have it. I never claimed I was funny. 😅
