I have a pine-phone and the virtual keyboard just refuses to pop up for some apps (like firefox!!). I keep looking in the settings for "force virtual keyboard on" or something but can't find it.

I like how sxmo lets you open/close the keyboard whenever you want by swiping up from / down to the bottom edge of the screen, regardless of what apps are open or what’s happening within them.

Firefox does use GTK unfortunately.

But this was running under Plasma Mobile

The Plasma Mobile Maliit keyboard works with GTK apps on Manjaro Plasma Mobile.

There must be some way to make this work on other Plasma Mobile distributions.

It indeed works now. Firefox was unusable on Plasma Mobile in 2020, it now mostly works on an updated Pinephone Pro (can't click on those popups when you try to install an extension, but the virtual keyboard shows up and seems to work ok).

I'll try Manjaro then; it definitely doesn't work on an up-to-date postmarketOS on a (non-pro) pinephone.

[edit]

Can confirm keyboard works in FF on Manjaro, but it has other jankiness (e.g. it seems to think it is much wider than the screen).

Turning scaling down to 1.8 (default 2.0 on Manjaro/Plasma) or lower lets Firefox work on the screen; I didn't have this problem on pmOS; either the default scaling is lower on pmOS, or they have some other workaround.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1579348

You may need to install package mobile-config-firefox