Soft keyboard woes. Advice please

[pdes]

I am a long-term Windows 10 user but until recently, have used an Android tablet so I am new to the Surface Pro 4. I also have the keyboard cover.

I am struggling to understand the "logic" of the soft keyboard on the SP4.

When I select a dialogue box in any app, I expect the soft keyboard to pop up and when I hit return after the text entry, for the keyboard to vanish. Is this a correct expectation?

Currently, the keyboard seems to pop up randomly and on most occasions, I have to hit the keyboard button to get it to appear. When it does, it's often in handwriting mode so I then have to select the keyboard mode. As mentioned before, the keyboard does not vanish after the text entry so I have to close it manually.

I have tried to find a solution and found a "fix" for Chrome but this didn't work either. I have made sure I am in "tablet" mode and have tried the manual and automatic switching.

Could someone please give me some guidance as to what to expect and, hopefully, point me to a setting that I may have missed as this is really spoiling the experience and excitement of a new system.

Many thanks

 

[Philtastic]

The handwriting keyboard is probably popping up because you tapped the text box using the pen, thus it is logical to pull up the stylus-based input method which generally works pretty well. Tap with your finger to have it bring up the typical touch keyboard. You can avoid having to go into tablet mode for the keyboard to automatically pop up by going into Start Menu -> Settings -> Devices -> Typing and toggling on the option at the bottom called "Show the touch keyboard...". This will enable automatic pop up of the touch keyboard in desktop mode.

Concerning automatic closing of the keyboard, I'm not sure if there would be a good way to do this. Unlike mobile OS'es, Windows allows for true multitasking where you can have an absurd number of programs open, active, and visible on the screen at all times. You also have a much larger variety of programs available that may do very different things. Unless the program itself explicitly tells Windows to close the keyboard, how is Windows supposed to know that it's in a situation where the keyboard should be closed? On mobile, you only ever use the keyboard to type so it knows that, once you're done typing, you won't need it. Consider whether there's a real difference between hitting enter after typing in an URL in your web browser vs. hitting enter in Excel to go to the next cell. I actually just tested this and the keyboard auto-closes in both Edge browser and Excel. The problem is that Chrome doesn't explicitly tell Windows to close the keyboard (I also just tested this. There's also a problem with no auto-capitalization). Until Google better implements Win10 keyboard support into Chrome, you're out of luck.

 

[pdes]

Phil, Many thanks for the comprehensive reply. You made me realize that there probably isn't anything wrong. Much calmer now!!

Cheers

 

[GMcC]

Can you explain why I sometimes have a tiny small space bar, and other times a bigger one? I often don't manage to hit it when it appears really small

 

[hughlle]

Can you explain why I sometimes have a tiny small space bar, and other times a bigger one? I often don't manage to hit it when it appears really small

It is to do with the field you are trying to type in. It is the same on android etc. For example, open Edge, and hit the address bar, when the keyboard comes up, the space bar will be tiny because the keyboard automatically makes room for additional keys such as ".com / - :" on the bottom row.

 

[pdes]

Another anomaly: when starting to type the query in the address bar of the browser, after the first character, the keyboard vanishes and needs to be manually opened to finish typing. Anyone else noticed this?

 

[hughlle]

Another anomaly: when starting to type the query in the address bar of the browser, after the first character, the keyboard vanishes and needs to be manually opened to finish typing. Anyone else noticed this?

It happens to me here and there, but it is a fairly rare occurrence. Not quite sure what prompted Microsoft to release their new operating system in a beta state, but while they're slowly ironing things out, they've still got a lot of work to do.