Develop Reference

Getting keystrokes from the soft keyboard from within a fragment

I have an activity that launches a fragment whose main purpose is to present the user with an Imagebutton that they can click to launch the soft keyboard and type in whatever text they like. I need to grab each key as it is pressed on the soft keyboard. However, the user is not typing into an EditText view so I am struggling a bit with this. I can successfully display the soft keyboard when the user clicks the ImageButton using the code below...
InputMethodManager imm = (InputMethodManager) getActivity().getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
imm.toggleSoftInput(InputMethodManager.SHOW_FORCED, InputMethodManager.HIDE_IMPLICIT_ONLY);
However, I have not been able to find an example or a method that would let me grab the keystrokes from the soft keyboard without an EditText. I assume this must be possible I just don't know how to go about it.

Maybe it helps if you implement your own InputMethodService? You can overwrite the onUpdateSelection() method, which is called every time when a key is touched on the softkeyboard.

Android Studio Soft Keyboard Close

I am using the soft keyboard in Android Studio in order to display user input on the screen. The program has a button, that when clicked, displays whatever it is that the person typed in. As soon as I click on the EditText field, the soft keyboard pops up and I type in the input. The only problem is that I dont know how to close it after I'm done. My Textfield, which displays the input, is at the bottom of the screen so I can't see it if the keyboard remains open. Shouldn't there be some type of button? Is there a way of solving this??? Thank you.

in the OnClickListener of the button, which you are using to display the text entered when clicked, you can add some thing which closes the keyboard when clicked.
Add this inside the onClickListener
InputMethodManager imm = (InputMethodManager)getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
imm.hideSoftInputFromWindow(view.getWindowToken(), 0);
so when you click the button, it hides the keyboard and displays the text entered.

Keyboard doesn't show up when EditText is in focus

I want to do the following.
User should be able to input one letter (only letter) from standard keyboard (hardware or software). If he is typing another letter, then the previous letter should be replaced with this one. So only the current letter should be displayed. User should be able to dismiss this dialog and get back to activity. And if he clicked "done" button in keyboard the activity should know what letter he entered.
So I thought about alert dialog and edit text with some extensions to display only current char. This is easy.
However, and this gets me mad already, although edit text is in focus the keyboard does not appear on the screen until edit text is clicked. Why is that so?
It should be, should it not?
I won't take something like the following for the answer, because I shouldn't have to do it manually. It should be automatic. Besides, I'm not sure how this would work with a hardware keyboard.
InputMethodManager imm = InputMethodManager)getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
imm.hideSoftInputFromWindow(YourEditText.getWindowToken(), 0);
I want to know why exactly the keyboard is not shown after edit text has focus?
And what should I do to get this functionality without manually enabling and disabling software keyboard.

Use this.
EditText yourEditText= (EditText) findViewById(R.id.yourEditText);
InputMethodManager imm = (InputMethodManager) getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
imm.showSoftInput(yourEditText, InputMethodManager.SHOW_IMPLICIT);

For your information, see this related question: Why the soft keyboard shows or not when an activity starts?. You can read it as an alternative by enclosing your EditText into a ScrollView.
But it's not more satisfying than the well known workaround (manually enabling the software keyboard) because we don't understand why it works better in this case...

Set android focus on touch?

I have this issue: in my app, when user taps on EditText bar, keyboard pops up. After that, it is impossible to get rid of keyboard. When back button is pressed, whole application just turn off.
How can I make sure, that when user taps on some other object (not EditText), keyboard will be removed? Or at least, how to make it possible to hide keyboard by tapping back button?
Thanks.

in xml for EditText this will make keyboard dismiss when press enter on keyboard
android:imeOptions="actionDone"

You can hide the keyboard simple by overriding onBackPressed in your Activity and using the following code:
InputMethodManager inputMethodManager = (InputMethodManager)getContext().getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
inputMethodManager.hideSoftInputFromWindow(anyView.getWindowToken(), 0);
Note that anyView can be any view that is attached to your current window.
You can see it working in my app called Magic Annotator. See method hideSoftKeyboard()

Android keyboard

My application starts with a bunch of text input fields, and I want that when starting up the the application. The virtual keyboard isn't open, but opens only when I click on one of the textinput fields.
How do I do this?

In your onCreate method you could get your first text view and call requestFocus() on it. This ought to focus this field when the activity starts and bring up a virtual keyboard if needed.
If you want the keyboard not to appear on startup, request focus for a non-text element like a button.

You should leave the input method to the user. They might be using a physical keyboard or maybe even something like speech to text.

I've used this approach to hide the keyboard after the user searches. You could use this in our onCreate method:
Close/hide the Android Soft Keyboard
Quote from Reto Meier's accepted solution:
InputMethodManager imm = (InputMethodManager)getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
imm.hideSoftInputFromWindow(myEditText.getWindowToken(), 0);