How to make a keyboard behave like… a keyboard

Right, I’ve trawled the forums and the internet in general and I have been unable to find anything to help with this.

I have kodi installed on raspbian (yes I know other distros exist for using kodi which are more streamlined, no they don’t meet my needs, yes I am sure that this is the setup I want).

Currently, the keyboard presses are recognised by Kodi but they all reference shortcuts, even when focused on a textbox or with the virtual keyboard onscreen. This is Undesireable Behaviour as far as I am concerned, and I would prefer to be able to type into the textboxes, even if this sacrifices keyboard shortcuts.

Is there a way to set this up?