Why is there a blank entry? Also these hardcoded values make me feel a little leery. Is there a way we can programmatically generate them or get them from SDDM or something?

In D22627#499699, @ngraham wrote:

Why is there a blank entry?

The blank entry is sort of the whole point of the option. The way to fix the virtual keyboard popping up on its own with some themes is to leave InputMethod empty:

https://github.com/MarianArlt/sddm-sugar-light/issues/2#issuecomment-439741458
https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/7lk2bs/onscreen_keyboard_on_sddm/

Also these hardcoded values make me feel a little leery. Is there a way we can programmatically generate them or get them from SDDM or something?

Not that I know of. The only time they're mentioned in the SDDM codebase is in this documentation file: https://github.com/sddm/sddm/blob/develop/data/man/sddm.conf.rst.in

In D22627#499798, @filipf wrote:

In D22627#499699, @ngraham wrote:

Also these hardcoded values make me feel a little leery. Is there a way we can programmatically generate them or get them from SDDM or something?

Not that I know of. The only time they're mentioned in the SDDM codebase is in this documentation file: https://github.com/sddm/sddm/blob/develop/data/man/sddm.conf.rst.in

Okay, that's fine.

In D22627#499798, @filipf wrote:

In D22627#499699, @ngraham wrote:

Why is there a blank entry?

The blank entry is sort of the whole point of the option. The way to fix the virtual keyboard popping up on its own with some themes is to leave InputMethod empty:

https://github.com/MarianArlt/sddm-sugar-light/issues/2#issuecomment-439741458
https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/7lk2bs/onscreen_keyboard_on_sddm/

So maybe this entry should be called "System Default" or something then? Having an empty entry in the combobox is just a really weird UI. Also, I feel like the mapping between this UI and the actual bug is not very clear. If the purpose is to work around that bug, IMO the UI should reflect that. If on the other hand the feature has more general utility, then the UI should make more clear just what it is and does, while somehow including a connection to the worked-around bug.

Does that make sense?

Yeah an empty entry is bad UI but it works for the code since it ends up just grabbing the text from the combobox and writing it to the config file :P ... it was a quick solution I'll admit.

The feature request was this, a much more straightforward idea: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=161536&p=420073#p420073

But having that checkbox seemed too specific and it seemed like having a general input method chooser might be more useful. What do you think?

In D22627#500454, @filipf wrote:

Yeah an empty entry is bad UI but it works for the code since it ends up just grabbing the text from the combobox and writing it to the config file :P ... it was a quick solution I'll admit.

Instead of just passing the string in the combobox directly to whatever writes the value to the file, you'd need to translate the value first.

The feature request was this, a much more straightforward idea: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=161536&p=420073#p420073

But having that checkbox seemed too specific and it seemed like having a general input method chooser might be more useful. What do you think?

The generic solution you've implemented here makes sense if the features you're exposing actually work in SDDM with all themes (in which case, we need to improve the UI here). If not, maybe do the simple checkbox as suggested in that forum post.