So this is a very niche tool, but I thought I'd post about it in case it has uses elsewhere.
Recently I heard about Moonring, a free RPG based on the Ultima games. It's really fun, and it seemed like a nice fit for the Deck. And for the most part it is - there are plenty of custom control layouts already that work well.
The one thing that annoyed me however is speaking to NPCs. You need to listen out for keywords and then type those in to advance the conversation. The game auto suggests what you may wish to say - for example 'treasure' may be mentioned and when you type 't' it suggests the full word. You then press tab to confirm. So a lot of the time I'd need to type a+tab, b+tab etc. This should work fine in theory but the steam keyboard is extremely temperamental! Bringing it up every time I wanted to quickly type was annoying me...
So I wanted to know if virtual menus could help, and yes!
To set this up, you want to create 8 Action Sets, labelled ABC, DEF and so on (PQRS and WXYZ are grouped, like on an old phone keypad). Personally I'd set ABC up first and then you can copy that action set when creating the others.
Whilst in the controller settings, press R1 to move across to the ABC action set, and then create a radial menu on the left trackpad. Within those settings, set the center button as changing the action set to default. Then add new buttons to trigger A, B and C. Under general settings, change button type to 'release', otherwise it can be quite easy to misinput when using the menus. Create the remaining action sets by copying ABC and change the buttons for the remaining letters.
Finally, create a touch menu on the default action set with buttons to change between the action sets. I also added buttons for tab, backspace and enter. As before, make sure it's set to 'release' activation rather than click.
I'm not sure how useful this will be to (if you want to type anything substantial, the regular keyboard does a good job) but it's cool to know that it's possible!
I might edit a few bits in my controller layout, then I'll export it in case anyone else wants to try this out.
Edit: Now uploaded to the community as 'Omega's layout' :)
I've seen a similar setup for typing of the dead, except they did touch menus and turned each trackpad into half a keyboard.
That's clever! For something where you need a keyboard constantly that seems like a good solution. (Although for a game like that I'd have thought an actual keyboard would be kinda the point lol)