Quick followup from last week’s post on setting up an onscreen keyboard. I couldn’t find a way of getting an onscreen keyboard, either matchbox-keyboard or florence, to respond on Raspbian’s logon screen. Rather than spend more time on investigating this, I just enabled the logon to desktop in raspi-config, and now logged on, either of the keyboards work as expected, perfectly well.
Florence seems to be the better of the two I tried. Once opened from the menu you can drag it around, or minimize it to a keyboard icon, so you can pop-it open as needed.
If I could get it to work from the logon screen too that would be awesome, but avoiding that issue and once you get to the desktop, it works great.
I have the default logon prompt when my Pi starts up, so first challenge is, how do you logon without a real keyboard attached, without having to disable the logon? There are a number of onscreen keyboards available – based on this thread I installed florence:
sudo apt-get install florence
and then edited /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf adding ~a11y; for the Accessibility icon on the logon screen, and keyboard=florence so it appears in the menu.
The keyboard now appears, but as soon as I press a key it disappears. From this thread, installing at-spi2-core appears to fix the issue:
sudo apt-get install at-spi2-core
This seems to fix the keybaord not disappearing, but not having any luck getting characters to appear in the username/password fields. Still some investigation to do on this one.
Raspbian Wheezy on the Raspberry Pi used to boot to a shell by default, but on Jessie, the default is to boot in graphical mode to the desktop. You can easily change this with raspi-config, either from the desktop menu using the gui app or raspi-config from the command line. Step by step instructions in this post.
I’ve been taking the 30 day eval of WebStorm for a spin. I’ve watched a few videos of people hacking on code in Javascript with various frameworks and libraries, and what’s really impressive is the speed that they manage to type code taking advantage of WebStorm’s code complete features.
I haven’t really thought about this too much as you take for granted what you’re used to, but in other IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans, most of the code complete features center around offering properties and methods on a Class after you type ‘.’ or Ctrl-Space – or at least that’s the way I’ve always thought how code complete works in those IDEs.
In Webstorm you get the same popup complete after a ‘.’ or on pressing Ctrl-Space. In addition though, if you start typing the first few letters and press return, if there’s anything matching those first few letters then it inserts that text, or shows you possible alternatives.
For example, if you type fu[Enter], you get:
[code]function () {
}[/code]
This saves some typing for sure, but what’s pretty cool is that the code complete can vary based on the *.js files you have imported using <script> in an HTML file, or other selected Libraries from the Preferences/Languages and Frameworks/JavaScript/Libraries. Which pretty much means you get code-complete on anything, anywhere in your source. Now that’s pretty cool.
There’s a great walkthrough of some of these features in this video from the guys at JetBrains:
