How to Install On-Screen Keyboard for Raspberry Pi

This tutorial will discuss installing the on-screen keyboard on a Raspberry Pi using the terminal of Raspberry Pi OS.

Install On-Screen Keyboard on Raspberry Pi

By default, Raspberry Pi OS does not have an on-screen keyboard, but it can be installed from the terminal easily because it is added to the packages of the Raspberry Pi OS. We can connect a Raspberry Pi with a keyboard using the USB port, but if we don’t have the keyboard, we can install the on-screen keyboard to type text using the mouse.

We can use the terminal of Raspberry Pi OS to install the on-screen keyboard, but before doing that, we need to update the installed packages of Raspberry Pi OS using the below commands.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

We can run the above commands one by one, and if an update is available, it will be listed, and we have to enter y to install it. After updating the installed packages, we can install the on-screen keyboard using the below command.

sudo apt install matchbox-keyboard

The above command will also ask for permission, and we must enter y to install the on-screen keyboard. Once the keyboard is installed, it will be listed in the Accessories section of Raspberry Pi OS, as shown below.

We can run the keyboard from the Accessories section or add it to the desktop by right-clicking on it, as shown in the above image. We can also run the on-screen keyboard from the terminal by typing matchbox-keyboard in the terminal, and to quit it, we need to use CNTRL+C.

If the keyboard does not respond, we can kill it from the task manager, which can also be opened from the Accessories section, as shown in the above image.