How to Capture Soft Keyboard Input in a View

How to capture soft keyboard input in a View?

Turns out that I did in fact need to subclass TextView and the use addTextChangedListener() to add my own implementation of TextWatcher in order to listen to soft key events. I couldn't find a way to do this with a plain old View.

One other thing, for those who will try this technique; TextView is not able to edit text by default, so if you want to make your implementation editable (instead of subclassing EditText, which I didn't want to to do), you must also make a custom InputConnection, something like the following:

 /**
 * MyInputConnection
 * BaseInputConnection configured to be editable
 */
class MyInputConnection extends BaseInputConnection {
    private SpannableStringBuilder _editable;
    TextView _textView;

    public MyInputConnection(View targetView, boolean fullEditor) {
        super(targetView, fullEditor);
        _textView = (TextView) targetView;
    }

    public Editable getEditable() {
        if (_editable == null) {
            _editable = (SpannableStringBuilder) Editable.Factory.getInstance()
            .newEditable("Placeholder");
        }
        return _editable;
    }

    public boolean commitText(CharSequence text, int newCursorPosition) {
        _editable.append(text);
        _textView.setText(text);
        return true;
    }
}

Then you override onCheckisTextEditor and onCreateInputConnection with something like the following:

 @Override
 public InputConnection onCreateInputConnection(EditorInfo outAttrs) {
     outAttrs.actionLabel = null;
     outAttrs.label = "Test text";
     outAttrs.inputType = InputType.TYPE_TEXT_FLAG_NO_SUGGESTIONS;
     outAttrs.imeOptions = EditorInfo.IME_ACTION_DONE;

     return new MyInputConnection(this, true);
 }

 @Override
 public boolean onCheckIsTextEditor() {
     return true;
 }

After this, you should have a View that can listen to the soft keyboard and you can do whatever you want with the key input values.

How to get input text from soft keyboard

I also faced same issue. if i hide edit text, edtTxt.getText().toString() gets empty always. so i kept like

<EditText
    android:id="@+id/edtTxt"
    android:layout_width="0px"
    android:layout_height="0px" />

So that user can't see that. and on click of button

edtTxt.requestFocus();
edtTxt.setText("");
InputMethodManager inputMethodManager = (InputMethodManager) getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);

inputMethodManager.toggleSoftInputFromWindow(edtTxt.getApplicationWindowToken(), InputMethodManager.SHOW_FORCED,
            0);

Now edtTxt.getText().toString() giving text what I typed using keyboard.

How to capture the virtual keyboard show/hide event in Android?

2020 Update

This is now possible:

On Android 11, you can do

view.setWindowInsetsAnimationCallback(object : WindowInsetsAnimation.Callback {
    override fun onEnd(animation: WindowInsetsAnimation) {
        super.onEnd(animation)
        val showingKeyboard = view.rootWindowInsets.isVisible(WindowInsets.Type.ime())
        // now use the boolean for something
    }
})

You can also listen to the animation of showing/hiding the keyboard and do a corresponding transition.

I recommend reading Android 11 preview and the corresponding documentation

Before Android 11

However, this work has not been made available in a Compat version, so you need to resort to hacks.

You can get the window insets and if the bottom insets are bigger than some value you find to be reasonably good (by experimentation), you can consider that to be showing the keyboard. This is not great and can fail in some cases, but there is no framework support for that.

This is a good answer on this exact question https://stackoverflow.com/a/36259261/372076. Alternatively, here's a page giving some different approaches to achieve this pre Android 11:

https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.noversion.service_sdk_android.meta/service_sdk_android/android_detecting_keyboard.htm

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Note

This solution will not work for soft keyboards and
onConfigurationChanged will not be called for soft (virtual)
keyboards.

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You've got to handle configuration changes yourself.

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/runtime-changes.html#HandlingTheChange

Sample:

// from the link above
@Override
public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) {
    super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);

    
    // Checks whether a hardware keyboard is available
    if (newConfig.hardKeyboardHidden == Configuration.HARDKEYBOARDHIDDEN_NO) {
        Toast.makeText(this, "keyboard visible", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
    } else if (newConfig.hardKeyboardHidden == Configuration.HARDKEYBOARDHIDDEN_YES) {
        Toast.makeText(this, "keyboard hidden", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
    }
}

Then just change the visibility of some views, update a field, and change your layout file.

How to catch a Done key press from the soft keyboard

Note: This answer is old and no longer works. See the answers below.

You catch the KeyEvent and then check its keycode. FLAG_EDITOR_ACTION is used to identify enter keys that are coming from an IME whose enter key has been auto-labelled "next" or "done"

if (event.getKeyCode() == KeyEvent.FLAG_EDITOR_ACTION)
    //your code here

Find the docs here.

Android - Get keyboard key press

For handling hardware keys and Back key you could use dispatchKeyEvent(KeyEvent event) in your Activity

@Override
public boolean dispatchKeyEvent(KeyEvent event) {
    Log.i("key pressed", String.valueOf(event.getKeyCode()));
    return super.dispatchKeyEvent(event);
}

UPD: unfortunately you can't handle soft keyboard events (see Handle single key events), unless you develop your own custom keyboard (follow the link to learn how Creating input method).

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