CYANOTYPE
BLUEPRINT DESKTOP
Documentation / Contents - On-Screen Keyboard
The preferences panel is a separate program, cyosk-prefs. Open it from Preferences on The Face Menu. Only one copy runs at a time.
Every control applies as soon as you move it. There is no Apply button; the live keyboard changes while the panel is open, so you can see what a setting does before you commit to it. Two buttons sit along the bottom: Defaults and Close.
The controls are on five pages: Layout, Appearance, Behavior, Session and Typing.
Four radio buttons choose the board. Model M Classic Keyboard is the full board; CyOSK Compact drops the function row, navigation cluster and numeric pad; On Board and Soft Micro are smaller still. See Overview of the On-Screen Keyboard.
Where Enter sits, and whether backslash is above it or left of Z, comes from the layout file rather than from a control here. See Layout, Size, and Placement.
A thumbwheel from 25 to 400 percent, with a readout above it that follows the wheel as you drag. The wheel's home position is 100 percent. This is the size the keyboard opens at.
Five radio buttons. "Match the desktop" is the default: the keyboard takes its colours from the desktop colour scheme, so it changes when the scheme changes. The other four ignore the scheme and use a fixed high-contrast pair: White on black, Black on white, Yellow on blue, Green on black.
Choosing any of the four greys out the key look controls below, because a high-contrast board draws plain square keys by design.
Three radio buttons for how a key is drawn: Flat keys, Raised keys (classic), or Outline only (lighter). Outline only is the cheapest to draw and is worth trying on old hardware or a remote display.
A check box. On, the keyboard wears an ordinary window frame. Off, it is frameless and you move it by dragging the empty space between keys. Same setting as Show Frame on The Face Menu.
A check box for the desk and window strip. See The Power Keys.
Three radio buttons: "Show on taskbar" (the default), "Show in Systray", or "Neither". This is where the keyboard appears when it is not its own window: as a window-list button, as a status icon, or not at all.
Automatic, Smooth OpenGL, or Simple. Automatic uses OpenGL when the display offers it and falls back to plain X drawing when it does not, which is the right answer almost always. Simple forces the plain X path; that is what machines with no OpenGL, and remote X connections, want. Smooth OpenGL insists on OpenGL and reports an error if it is unavailable.
A check box, on by default. The keyboard stays above other windows so it does not vanish behind the window you are typing into.
Quick stretch, Outline only, or Full redraw. This is the paint quality while you drag a corner, not the finished result. See Typing With the Keyboard.
A check box, off by default. Off, the board keeps its proportions while you resize. On, you can squash it to any shape you like, and the keys will look it.
A check box, on by default. This is how you move a frameless board.
Automatic, Standard desktop, Classic Motif, or Floating overlay. This decides how the keyboard asks to be treated as a window. Automatic reads what the running window manager supports and picks; the other three force a particular convention, which is occasionally what a third-party window manager needs. Leave it on Automatic first.
Automatic, System typing, or Direct to window. See Typing With the Keyboard.
Automatic, Cyanotype window manager, Indigo Magic style, Standard desktop, or Minimal. This is the label the keyboard uses for the desktop it thinks it is running under. It affects presentation only; the actual features are always probed, never assumed from this setting. Automatic is correct unless you are testing.
Six radio buttons: Lower right, Lower left, Upper right, Upper left, Center, and Disable FindIt. The first five choose the spot the keyboard lands on when FindIt runs and, in doing so, turn FindIt on. Disable FindIt turns the gesture and the summon off entirely, while remembering the corner so that turning it back on restores your choice.
"Open the keyboard when you log in" is a check box, off by default. cyosk only records this; the session start-up script is what acts on it, so it takes effect at your next login rather than now.
Turns the suggestion bands on. See Word and Phrase Suggestions.
Turns on dwell activation: rest the pointer on a key and it presses itself. The dial below sets how long you must rest, from 200 to 5000 milliseconds, and the label beside it reads back the current time. The dial is insensitive while hover is off.
See Making the Keyboard Easier to Use.
Defaults puts every setting back to the stock value. It applies at once, like every other control here, so the live keyboard changes as soon as you press it.
Close dismisses the panel. Nothing is pending when you close it; your changes were written as you made them. See Where the Settings Live.
Cyanotype Project. Blueprint Desktop. BSD 2-clause.
Not affiliated with Silicon Graphics. SGI, IRIX, and Indigo Magic
belong to their owners. 1.0 is aimed at 31 October 2026.