How can I make the Android emulator show the soft keyboard?

Question

I'm debugging an issue with the soft keyboard display not displaying when it should. However, I don't have a device handy for testing. The problem is that the emulator never shows the soft keyboard.

Some skins have a keyboard constantly displayed on the right, some don't, but none that I've tried so far has ever shown a keyboard on the device screen.

Is there some setting that I missed?

Answer 1

I found out how to do this on the Android emulator itself (Menu, "Settings" App - not the settings of the emulator outside). All you need to do is:

open settings app -> Language & Input -> Go to the "Keyboard & Input Methods -> click Default

This will bring up a Dialog in which case you can then disable the Hardware Keyboard by switching the hardware keyboard from on to off. This will disable the Hardware keyboard and enable the softkeyboard.