A full-size, themeable on-screen keyboard for Linux — the Onboard replacement that works on Wayland.
Keystone is a practical desktop on-screen keyboard for GNOME and KDE (Wayland and X11). It fills the gap left when the old X11 keyboards stopped working under Wayland: a resizable, good-looking, full keyboard — number row, function keys, navigation cluster and numpad — that you can actually use on a modern desktop.
- Full and compact layouts — switch between a complete keyboard (F-row, nav cluster, numpad) and a slim typing layout.
- Resizable & draggable — scales cleanly from a small floating bar to a large keyboard; remembers size and position per mode.
- Themeable — six built-in themes (Dracula, Midnight, Mocha, Dusk, Dark, Light) plus drop-in custom theme packs, including theme inheritance.
- Word suggestions — offline autocomplete with learned words.
- System tray + restore icon — minimizes to the tray, with a draggable on-screen restore icon as a fallback when no tray is available.
- Load on startup — a menu toggle (XDG autostart) starts Keystone tray-only at login.
- Single-instance control — show/hide/toggle from the command line or a keybinding.
- Python 3.11+
- PySide6 (Qt 6)
ydotool— used to emit keystrokes.ydotooldmust be running and your user must have access to/dev/uinput.- (optional)
wl-clipboard— enables clipboard-based text/emoji output; otherwise keys are typed individually viaydotool.
Wayland deliberately blocks applications from injecting keystrokes the way X11
allowed — which is exactly why the older on-screen keyboards broke. Keystone
emits input through ydotool's uinput device, so it works under Wayland. The
trade-off is a one-time setup: the ydotoold daemon must run and your user needs
permission to write to /dev/uinput.
# Install ydotool (Arch example)
sudo pacman -S ydotool
# Allow your user to use /dev/uinput, then start the daemon
sudo usermod -aG input "$USER" # log out/in afterwards
systemctl --user enable --now ydotool # or run `ydotoold` manuallyRun keystone-osk --doctor to check that everything is wired up correctly.
makepkg -sicd source
python -m build
pip install dist/*.whlkeystone-osk # start the keyboard
keystone-osk --mode full # start in the full layout
keystone-osk --theme mocha # pick a themeDiagnostics and control:
keystone-osk --doctor # environment / dependency check
keystone-osk --list-themes # list available theme packs
keystone-osk --show # show / focus a running instance
keystone-osk --hide # hide a running instance
keystone-osk --toggle # toggle visibility (bind to a hotkey)
keystone-osk --quit # quit a running instanceBuilt-in themes: dracula, midnight, mocha, dusk, dark, light.
Add your own by dropping a theme.json into:
~/.local/share/keystone/themes/<your-theme-id>/theme.json
A theme pack can set colors, opacity, and icon overrides, and can inherit
from a built-in or another pack. The schema also reserves font, spacing,
corner_radius, and border_width for future theme expansion, but those
fields are not applied to rendering yet. Run keystone-osk --list-themes
to confirm a pack is detected and valid.
The built-in ids above are reserved — a pack reusing one is ignored (and
flagged in --doctor), so give your pack a new id and inherit the built-in
to customize it.
Keystone follows the XDG base directories:
- Window state:
~/.local/state/keystone-osk/window-state.json - Learned words:
~/.local/state/keystone-osk/words.json - Custom themes:
~/.local/share/keystone/themes/
If you use the Better Blur KWin effect (kwin-effects-better-blur /
better_blur_dx, shipped by default on Garuda Mokka) with "Blur non-matching
windows" enabled, it force-blurs a region around every window not on its
exclusion list. This draws a blurry frame around Keystone's minimized desktop
icon that no app-side setting can prevent.
Fix: add keystone-osk to the effect's window-class exclusion list, either in
System Settings → Desktop Effects → Blur (Better Blur) → window classes, or
directly in ~/.config/kwinrc under [Effect-better-blur-dx]:
WindowClasses=xwaylandvideobridge\nvlc\nkeystone-osk(keep any existing entries, \n-separated). The effect only classifies
windows when they are created, so restart Keystone (or log out and back in)
for the exclusion to take effect.
Keystone is free software released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or
later (GPL-3.0-or-later). See source/LICENSE for the full
text. You're free to use, study, modify and share it; modified versions you
distribute must also be GPL-licensed with source available.
Keystone is free to use. If it saves you typing, consider chipping in — anything helps, $5 is great, $10 helps pay the bills. There are generous people out there. 🙏
Thank you for trying Keystone.
Copyright © 2026 keystoneosk. Licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later.