Win10: Onscreen keyboard is missing functionality.

[Jeff7]

Yes, another Win10 thread. I figured I should keep each grievance in a separate thread?

Fujitsu tablet, now on Win10.
Summary: The full onscreen keyboard, once it can finally be enabled, does not have home/end/pgup/pgdn, and it cannot be resized.

- The default onscreen keyboard looks like it's out of a cheap tablet. Numbers and punctuation are only accessible by an additional button-press. I don't normally associate "extra keystrokes are now required" with "We've improved the interface."

- It can't be resized. This is a widescreen tablet. In Win10, I had the full keyboard resized to about 70% of the width of the screen, so it was comfortable to use. Now it is stretched across the entire screen and cannot be changed.

- Enabling the "full" keyboard required a few extra steps, but it's still missing home/end/pgup/pgdn. I use those keys frequently. Page Up and Page Down together are nearly 10% of all keystrokes. Home and End together are about 1%. (Thanks to Whatpulse for keeping track.) Home and End are good timesavers for highlighting whole lines of text.

- In Win7, it was predictable where it would pop up: There was a small sliver of an indicator on the left side that showed the alignment. In Win10, it appears wherever Windows thinks it won't be in the way. Unfortunately, Windows is helpful like a 1-year-old kid is: Thinks it's helping, but usually isn't.


If I use the Accessibility Tools' onscreen keyboard, it is resizable, predictable, and has all the buttons I want. But it doesn't perform like the normal onscreen keyboard: It doesn't permit multi-touch. The regular keyboard works with multitouch, so if I'm going to open Task manager and do Ctrl+Shift+Esc and happen to touch more than one at a time, it knows what to do. Accessibility Tools onscreen keyboard will accept only a single press at a time, and ensuring that that is adhered to slows me down a bit.


Is there any way to tweak the default onscreen keyboard?

 

[Hugh Jass]

Maybe your tablet just doesn't handle W10 very well.

 

[quikah]

No, you cannot change as far as I know.

Personally I cannot fathom what use those keys would have on the onscreen keyboard. PgUp/Dn, just swipe up down on the screen. Home/end, just tap on the screen where you want the cursor.

Maybe you should stick to Win7.

 

[Jeff7]

No, you cannot change as far as I know.

Personally I cannot fathom what use those keys would have on the onscreen keyboard. PgUp/Dn, just swipe up down on the screen. Home/end, just tap on the screen where you want the cursor.

Maybe you should stick to Win7.

Tapping on the screen with a finger is only accurate to ±"many" pixels, and often doesn't work so well when working with text, especially narrow characters like "i" or "l".
I'll also use home/end preferentially because my hands are already busy at the onscreen keyboard. Having to go tap at the text instead means more moving around the interface. My idea of an interface improvement is something that reduces the amount of motion and button-pressing.
But, I'm sure that most people don't even know what home/end even do.
I'm also the kind of user that gets comments at work like "Do you even use your mouse at all?" The keyboard is just so much faster and easier for many navigation tasks. Home and End are especially useful in Excel for quickly selecting large blocks of data. (One of the other types of comments I get at work is along the lines of "Holy s---! How did you do that so fast??")

Page up/down: It's a simple tap rather than a swipe, and I can plop the keyboard in one place mostly off-screen and press pgup/dn with very little additional movement, like if I'm reading a long article or short story. Swiping can also run the risk of mistakenly activating a link on a page, or worse, an advertising link.

But if I had to choose, I'd prefer resizability over the rest. Then home/end, and pgup/pgdn last.


Yes, I am considering rolling back to Win7 on the tablet. Various things have gone backward in terms of touchscreen friendliness, and removal of customizations from previous versions.
But I'm hesitating to do it because it overall feels like it's a better OS. A lot of Windows 7 is still in there somewhere. While going through settings, I see a lot of very familiar-looking windows and dialog boxes.