Let me give you an update on the current state of Onboard in gnome-
shell.

First, things changed - a lot. The work is happening in a new independent 
project OnboardOSK at 
https://launchpad.net/onboardosk
This is basically a fork of Onboard, written mainly in C++. There's no Python 
involved apart from supporting tools.

At the project's core is the (largely) toolkit-independent shared
library libonboardosk.so. It contains an onscreen keyboard closely
resembling the original Onboard in appearance and, well eventually,
features.

A second shared library libonboardoskgnomeshell.so implements the
toolkit-dependent parts, here by integrating with Clutter and GObject
introspection.

A new GNOME Shell extension then embeds OnboardOSK into the shell and
provides the shell's services to the shared libraries below.

The end result is an onscreen keyboard that is already quite
indistinguishable from the old standalone Onboard, but, and that's a big
but, it's not done and realistically won't be before Artful feature
freeze.

So what works, what's missing? The majority of the old Onboard's
features are ported by now, e.g., key logic, word suggestions, emoji
palette, themes, color schemes, etc. are there. "window" (actor)
handling has become more complete and smoother. Hover-click does
something even without mousetweaks (for Wayland), but is limited to the
keyboard itself.

The main missing things are
- long-press popups (in progress currently)
- click-mapping buttons (right-, middle-, double-, drag-click)
- modifier+click for accessibility
- keyboard scanning
- a bunch of dialogs: snippets, language model error recovery

Most worryingly, however, Wayland support is still lagging behind X.
Developing in Wayland is a bit of a pain because there is no easy way to
restart GNOME Shell (that I'm aware of). Reloading extensions is
insufficient as this won't reload shared libraries. Therefore my
strategy has been to get as much as possible done outside of GNOME Shell
in Wayland, replacing with GNOME Shell in X and test_stage.js in Wayland
and switch back later. Well, that's going to be soon, but the time is
up.

So, apologies, I tried to make it happen for 17.10, but it'll take more
time. We'll very likely make the 18.10 release, however, as default or
not.

FWIW, this message was typed with with OnboardOSK in GNOME Shell (X).
What is there seems to work alright. No crashes lately, no noticeable
leaking (unlike Python Onboard).

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1672465

Title:
  Onboard doesn't work in Wayland

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