Setting the Return key on the Android keyboard

Question

Does anyone of you friendly coders know how to change the text on the return key of the android keyboard. I am catching the return event of an EditText element to start an action. So I would like to show the user, that he can start the action with that key. Some applications do that. E.g. they replace the key with a search symbol.

I am also wondering why apps always have an additional button aside the text field. Clearly, this takes away screen space. But it may be necessary for some purpose I am not aware off. The one problem I could imagine is task switching. After switching back, the user would have to call the keyboard before he could start the action. The other is a hardware keyboard, but anyone will assume that the return key will start the action.

R.G.

Answer 1

There are some ways to change the behaviour of the return button on your software keyboard. If you want to have the search Icon on your keyboard you have to add android:imeOptions="actionSearch" to your EditText View. There are some other actions that you can set for an overview over the available options have a look at the documentation of the TextView.

I would guess the reason that there are buttons next to many textfields to trigger the action is because users are used to it and would be a little bit at loss if the button is missing especially users with a hardware keyboard or if the software keyboard disappeared. One additional problem is that the return key is also used to create line breaks this means that if you want to have a multi line text field you cant use the return key to start an action.