Faq and known issues

[SeventhM]

This issue is being used to document the main things regarding this fork. Ideally this fork will be used to update the primary branch upstream, though if not, I will move most of the information of this issue to the readme or a similar md file
The primary Java branch will be https://github.com/SeventhM/hackerskeyboard/tree/workingBranch
The primary Kotlin branch will be https://github.com/SeventhM/hackerskeyboard/tree/kotlinBranch
Ideally I will move everything to the kotlin branch to make working on the project easier going forwards, though the Java branch will be kept in case the upstream project comes back to life and sticks to that language (@klausw, I would love to know where you stand on that)

Known issues and/or differences for users

• The minimum supported version has been increased from API 14 (Android 4.0, 4.0.1, and 4.0.2) to API 19 (Android 4.4, 4.4.1, 4.4.2, 4.4.3, and 4.4.4). Any devices older than API 19 that could use this fork of Hacker's Keyboard no longer will be able to, to my knowledge
• The menus look notably different than before. This is a technical limitation due to the requirement of needing a defined layout theme for most of the app. If someone would like to make a theme that matches the old style, please feel free to help. Otherwise, if the new theme is liked well enough, then I will not look into editing it further
• The ability to open the keyboard from a notification has been changed from just a press on the notification to needing to press for the dropdown the notification provides. This is to comply with a potential removing of the ability to function in newer versions of android
• On android versions 12 and above, the ability to open the keyboard from a notification no longer works. This is due to a limitation of requirements in newer versions of android. Eventually, I will look into ways around this limitation, though, it may take some time as no other open source keyboards seems to offer this feature
• Keys pressed on the keyboard seems to not register in certain apps where GBoard does work. I have not looked into the causes of this yet
• Some settings don't set themselves correctly

If anyone knows of any bug with the upstream project, please mkae it known somewhere

Notable differences/bugs for devs

• This fork avoids using the older support library where possible to instead make use of androidx. This should be the expected standard moving forwards, as it's the only set of libraries Google will update moving forwards
• There are various cases of deprecated methods being used. Aside from the instance of AsyncTask left, these are generally all necessary to support devices below API 24. For the kotlin side of things, I plan on adjusting it eventually to instead make use of extension methods. For the Java side of things, I am unsure how I will handle it moving forwards, though it doesn't actually show that it is deprecated in Java
• Most cases of the AsyncTask library have been removed. I'm not fully aware of the reasoning, though these have generally been replaced by the use of functions and Java executors. There have been one case of it leftover as it is far more complicated and involved as the other examples
• There are a number of strings that were not in the primary strings.xml file that were in many translations. These were added in using the Great Britain English translation as the base. I'm not sure where they were intended to be used or was intended to say on the default English version, but this should help help these strings show up more where they are supposed to
• Likewise, there are a number of translations that Android Studio flags as having suspicious language and region codes. It would be helpful if someone can double check
• A number of dimensions (1, 2, 3, and 4) are labeled in inches rather than some sort of pixel dimension (such as dp). This should be fixed eventually to be more consistent across devices

[TPS]

Is this is in good enough shape to be published to F-Droid as (at least, unstable) fork? Auto-updating would be a great benefit.

[SeventhM]

I might want to double check a few more things before I publish to F-Droid. I also need to learn how to publish to F-Droid in the first place. At the very least, I'm running into an issue where on a device that wasn't my test device, now the keyboard's suggestion bar gets stuck at the bottom of the screen sometimes. Seems likely both it isn't closing resources properly and I probably broke it's ability to detect that it's been dismissed

[matte22ladde]

Is this layout possible to be implemented? The option that allows to view function keys by default would be nice to have.

A repository of the fork appears to be available as mentioned here