Question

On a device with a virtual set of hard buttons, is there any way to show the virtual back button instead of showing the virtual close keyboard button when user is interacting with an EditText widget? For example, on the Nexus 7 Android 4.1:

For this dialog, when editing text, I’d rather see:

I’d like a dialog I bring up to only allow the keyboard action button — search in my case — or the back button to be pressed. It doesn’t make sense to hide the keyboard.

Edit: as pointed out below, physical back button does same as virtual hide keyboard button when keyboard is open: it closes the keyboard.

Answer 1

You’ll have to root the phone and install a custom rom to do that. But even if there was another way, I’d recommend against it since the back button will still work and will hide the keyboard as you wish and also because nexus users expect that button to work in the default way and if a certain app overrides that behavior, it’ll lead to an inconsistent user experience which is never good.