Automatically open keyboard on text field focus

[deadsuperhero]

Currently, SteamOS on Steam Deck suffers from what I'd consider to be a usability papercut: unless a game explicitly makes a call to the iSteamUtils GamepadTextInput API, the user has to manually invoke the gamepad keyboard by hitting "Steam + X" on a controller. For a one-and-done scenario, this is not so bad, but there are a few areas where the overall user experience is hurt:

[ol]
[li]Desktop applications, such as the web browser, Discord, the terminal, etc, require users to repeatedly do manual keyboard invocation for basic interaction. This makes browsing the web or using anything in desktop mode without a physical keyboard tedious, to the point that it is almost unusable.[/li]
[li]Older games, either on Steam or from elsewhere, may never get around to implementing the calls that the SteamOS Keyboard is looking for. This relegates a number of games to "Playable" status, and makes text-input-based games practically unplayable.[/li]
[/ol]

I think a reasonable workaround would be to follow the examples of some Linux-based virtual keyboards such as Maliit[github.com] and onBoard[launchpad.net], which both feature the functionality for the keyboard to open when an application's text input field is selected in focus. Instead of putting the burden on developers to specifically make calls to open a system keyboard, it would be better if the system keyboard could listen for input focus and capture those events for games and applications instead. Of course, if the user has a physical keyboard plugged in, it should not open at all.

Supporting this kind of functionality throughout all of SteamOS, in both Game Mode and Desktop Mode, would be a huge quality-of-life improvement.

[d[-_-]b]

** desktop mode **
No, i dont want the keyboard just popping up when i click a box, i might be clicking for another reason, so i dont want half my screen taken up by a keyboard i dont need.

what really needs to be solved is when the keyboard is requested, to know where the input box is on screen so that when the keyboard shows it can not cover up that box.
at the moment it seems to miss guess (or just randomly decide) whether to show at the top or bottom of the screen

even better would be to be able to choose the size of the keyboard, we all dont have vision problems and making it much smaller would be acceptable.