Onscreen keyboard: how to improve the experience

[Vistaus]

By default, GNOME Shell has a pretty terrible onscreen keyboard and other DE's might not have a built-in one per se. Luckily, you can easily improve the experience so that it becomes perfectly useable. And by perfectly I really mean perfectly.

Using your favorite package manager or the terminal, install onboard

After installation, open up the Onboard Settings app as well Onboard itself. Now of course, this is a bit of a personal preference for most of the settings, but what I find to work awesome and beautiful as a setup is setting the following things:

General tab:
-Check Auto-show when editing text

Window tab:
-Check Dock to screen edge and then hit the Settings button; choose Bottom as the location and check the other 3 things as well
-After that, resize the keyboard to your likings by mouse (or using the touch screen, but it's a bit tricky like that) just like you would resize an app window. When done, go to the Resize Protection tab and set Frame resize handles: to None to prevent accidentally resizing the keyboard when near an edge. You can always set it back if you do need to resize the keyboard.

Layout tab:
-Depends on how many keys you want, but I personally like the Compact layout the best. You can play around with this to see what you like.

Theme tab:
-Depends on what theme you like, but IMHO the best looking theme and also most modern looking theme is Blackboard.
-Whatever theme you choose, hit the Customize theme button and play around. I personally set it to:
Keyboard tab: Color scheme: Charcoal, Gradient ba:ckground: 0, Light direction angle: -7.
Keys tab: Style: Flat, Roundness: 0, Size: 96, Border width: 36
Label tab: Font: Prelude (though you need to install that font; on a pure GNOME Shell desktop w/o installing fonts, Cantarell would integrate the best), Super key: Super, check Independent size.

Keyboard tab:
-I personally check Show label pop-ups, but that's subject to personal preference. You can also enable key sounds if you want to.

Typing Assistance tab:
-Check Show suggestions and check all the sub checkboxes under Options as well.
-Also, if you don't like auto-capitalizing, disable that on the Auto-correction tab.

Do note that you need to launch Onboard every time you decide to switch go touch only but that's a matter of a few clicks, really.
Enjoy! :)

[schuhumi]

You may find these quite handy:
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/992/onboard-integration/
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/993/slide-for-keyboard/