Develop Reference

Android: Pull out emoji keyboard on button press

I know that you can specify a short message input type in order to turn the enter key of the keyboard into an emoji button and pressing it will show up the emoji list but what i want to do is open up the emoji list programatically from a button. Is this possible?

There is no functionality to add tabs to any generic keyboard. Certain keyboards may support it, but it isn't a common feature. You could write your own fully custom keyboard, but that's a lot of work and will piss off many users.
Also, I'm not sure what you mean about by like in hangouts. I use hangouts- it doesn't do anything odd with my keyboard. It stays as Swype, there's no special emoji tab. It may be a feature of your favorite keyboard based on the input type (I assume both use input type textShortMessage). But it isn't a generic feature.
See Link Android Keyboard with Emoji
Thanks and enjoy...

How to create a customized android keyboard?

I am trying to figure out how to make a customized android keyboard. I want additional keys in the keyboard like page up, page down, etc. I want these keys to perform the actions that I want them to do. For example,
http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/hackers-keyboard-is-a-full-5-row-on-screen-keyboard-for-android/
Have a look at the above provided keyboard layouts. How can i do this? Any useful pointers??
Thank you in advance,
Mohsin

You need to create an input method.
Read more about it here, here and here.

android add buttons on top of softkeyboard

I want to add some buttons on top of the soft keyboard (Enter and Cancel). Is there a nice way to do this or do I have to detect the keyboard being shown and add the buttons into my view?

I can't see the logic your trying to apply here.
if you add buttons above your keyboard then you lose some areas in your keyboard (for example you cant press on q w s a).
I think you should look into creating your own custom keyboard.
maybe this will help
android app specific soft keyboard
Jason

You won't be able to do this, and with good reason. If apps could modify an existing input method like this, they could trivially log all keystrokes on your device without you knowing. If you've ever installed a custom input method, you'll see a big warning that using it means trusting it not to log your keystrokes, and the functionality you're after would totally circumvent that protection.

How do i add words to the suggestions on top of the soft keyboard

Is there any way to add words to the suggestions in the soft keyboard?
For a specific Edittext field i would like to add a list of names to the suggestions that pops up on top of the soft keyboard in android 2.0.
Does anyone know if this is possible?

Here is the source code of the soft keyboard.
If you go through the code, you will see that it uses a Suggest class which inside has different dictionaries.
If you want to add words for a specific EditText you would need to add and remove or change freq of a certain word from those dictionaries.
Some issues:
I couldn't find a way to get the InputMethodService's instance. (If you can, please answer my question here)
Android allows developers to program their own InputMethodService. I am working on one myself and my implementation doesn't use that dictionaries. So your feature will not work with my IME.
I would suggest using Auto Complete.

You can't add additional words to the ones the IME finds internally, however you can whole-sale supply your own completions via InputMethodManager.displayCompletions():
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/inputmethod/InputMethodManager.html#displayCompletions(android.view.View, android.view.inputmethod.CompletionInfo[])
This is what the auto complete text view uses to show its completions in the IME, when the IME is full screen so it can't be seen. Note that your app is still responsible for showing the completions itself, so they will be available to the user if the IME is not full screen.
(And sorry about the lack of documentation on that method.)

android app specific soft keyboard

Is there a way to create an app specific soft keyboard on Android? After reading about InputMethodService docs and checking out alternative keyboard apps out there, I figure the alternate keyboard can only be configured for system wide usage (through Settings -> Locale and Text).
If the answer to above question is no, then is there at least a way to load a custom dictionary and override the default dictionary of the system keyboard (only when my app is in use)? That will help in giving very relevant suggestions to the user when he has only tapped couple of keys.

If you just want a View that looks and acts like a soft keyboard, I did that in my SmallKeyboard class. You just need to extend android.inputmethodservice.KeyboardView and decide on layout. See the onKey and onText methods at the end of that file for the action taken when keys are pressed.
Instead of my keyboard model inner class, you could load it from XML if your key set is fairly constant.

The Android Nethack application has a complete and clear source code example of how to create a custom keyboard for an application, how to display it on screen and how to define multiple keyboard layouts. It contains pretty much everything you need to know.
It is by far the best example I have seen.
http://code.google.com/p/nethack-android/