The Adafruit PiTFT is a nifty bit of kit that fits on top of the Pi and gives you a small touch screen display. William Phelps has created a touchscreen keyboard for the PiTFT and has shared the code on Github. Here’s what he had to say about it:

I needed a touch keyboard for some projects using the most excellent Adafruit PiTFT. I found Tony Maro’s Virtual Keyboard project, originally for a Nokia tablet, and modified it to work on the Adafruit PiTFT display. This is specifically for the PiTFT – the sizes and display support are all set for the PiTFT in landscape mode.

At present there is no support for Alt, Tab or Ctrl but they could be easily added. It does support tapping in the text input area to move the input cursor (I just got that working today). The Shift key is locking; tap it again to turn off.

One change I am working on is to have a pop-up display of the currently selected key to make it easier to get the right key. Right now it highlights them but if you are using a finger it’s hard to see. With this change you can slide your finger around until you get the key you want and then let go to select it.

It’s fully open source under GNU V3. It’s up on my Github repo.