Linux Chrome OS support

[wvalen89]

Summary

I was wondering if and devs have been able to use plover on a Chromebook now that there is Linux support? And if you have please help(commands for Linux, what file, how to, etc.) I'm new to all of this
And if you haven't would this be possible in the future?

Reproducing

Plover Version

System

[nsmarkop]

Some users on the Discord server were experimenting with this. Essentially, you can run Plover under Chrome OS's Linux support (Crostini) but it can only interact with applications that are also being run under that, so not the full operating system. Naturally if you use Crouton to run Linux on the side or just install a completely different OS like GalliumOS you can use Plover with those but that's not exactly the same.

Dotterel, a stenography engine for Android, can be installed if your Chromebook supports Android applications but there are some issues there as well. It seems Chrome OS will only allow it to work when in landscape mode and it does not allow it to communicate with external devices (your keyboard for example).

I can't speak for the possibility of this all working in the future, but I would say it is unlikely as there are OS-level limitations here that prevent something like Plover from having full input control of Chrome OS. Someone would likely have to separately implement a stenography engine on top of something that Chrome OS currently supports, like chrome.input.ime extensions, or Chrome OS would have to start fully supporting Android applications providing input methods for the OS at which point Dotterel would be the answer instead of Plover.

[davidedelvento]

I know nothing about this other than being interested in running plover on a chromebook and being able to read some technical stuff.

According to this FAQ copy-paste is supported, so a workaround would be to install inside Crostini plover and another application (e.g. simple text editor) for typing while occasionally doing copy-paste into the actual Chrome apps. Not wonderful but ok as a first step.

However, according to this other FAQ hardware devices are not supported (yet?) so you are limited to the certainly not good Chromebook keyboard which makes the whole thing much less useful.

Assuming that they fix the latter, I can't think of a simple workaround to fix the former programmatically. Perhaps a custom keyboard shortcut could help. But does ChromeOS support custom shortcuts? If so, are they shared between "inside Crostini" and "outside Crostini"? The shortcut could do select-all -> copy -> change focus -> paste -> change focus in one keystroke (ideally on the steno keyboard), but as @nsmarkop said it's not exactly the same. Yet that may be good enough for most uses.