Raspberry Pi Matchbox virtual keyboard missing colon

Question

The Matchbox virtual keyboard is missing the colon character. Is there a solution to add this character?

Answer 1

Per lornix's comment below the question, pressing the shift modifier key should change the semicolon to a colon. I'm reasonably sure that this is the relevant code used in the keyboard-extended.xml file which, I think, is the layout you're using at the moment:

<key fill='false'>
      <default display=";" />
      <shifted display=":" />
</key>

If, for whatever reason, you can't press the shift key and need to make a new layout with a colon, there are some instructions provided on matchbox's Github page:

Making your own keyboard layouts

Keyboard layout files are UTF8 XML files ( Make sure they are saved with this encoding! ). They are loaded from the directory $PREFIX/share/matchbox-keyboard and are named in the format keyboard[-locale][-variant].xml. This can be overridden by setting MB_KBD_CONFIG environment variable to a valid config file path or by creating $HOME/.matchbox/keyboard.xml.

The basic layout of the file looks like;

<keyboard>

<options>
</options>

<layout>
  <row>
    <key ...>       
      <default .. >     
      <shifted .. >     
      <mod1 .. >
      ....    
    <key>
    .... more keys ...    
    <space width="1000" />
  </row>
  <row>
  ...
  </row>
</layout>

</keyboard>