Kev’s Blog – Page 176 – Kev's Development Toolbox

May 14, 2016

In progress: Setting up an onscreen keyboard for the 7″ touchscreen on the Raspberry Pi

I just received one of these very cool 7″ touchscreens for the Raspberry Pi: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-touch-display/

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.

April 29, 2016

Booting Raspbian Jessie to a shell prompt

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.

April 26, 2016

WebStorm: code completion, everywhere!

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:

April 25, 2016

WebStorm: adding library support for Jasmine

WebStorm provides support to download libraries to provide code complete for a huge number of popular libraries.

I tried to add a Library for Jasmine manually, but really wasn’t sure where to point to, I tried pointing to here, but this didn’t seem to work for me:

/usr/local/lib/node_modules/karma-jasmine

If you press the Download button on the right, you can search for a known library and install it like this:

I think part of what I was looking for was jasmine and karma-jasmine, but installing from the Download option got these setup for me, and now I’ve got the code complete in my Jasmine tests that I was looking for.