Hide keyboard while connected, as if with a physical keyboard

[fefo-dev]

Hi. Can you make the phone identify scrcpy like a physical keyboard, to disable the software one? I've seen workarounds with scripts and fake-ish keyboard apps but they seem so convoluted, while with physical keyboards the behaviour is pretty consistent - no need for it when you got the real thing. Can you manipulate this 'flag' like that?

Feel free to disregard the feature request if it's a repeat, but I couldn't find anything that outlined this clearly.

[ghost]

It would also be nice to have a hotkey which makes the cursor inside the scrcpy window serve as an actual mouse to android. Some applications have a better interface for mouse than touch.

[colicrod]

Some suggestion: what if you install null keyboard (from app store). It display nothing. Other options the one i'm using now is ADB keyboard. Helps me to send alphanumeric and android commands / shortcut via ADB where scrcpy still needs time to fix the issue.

[srevinsaju]

Installing KDE Connect from playstore and on your OS, will help to identify your keyboard as a physical keyboard, and not show the virtual one. KDE Connect created by KDE. Works on all DEs, special features on Plasma

[fefo-dev]

@colicrod I was doing this but it's not the most optimal. Null has the extra issue of needing to dive into settings to enable your soft keyboard again since Android doesn't identify it, by design.

@srevinsaju haven't heard of your solution, I'll test it later.

I'll see how android works when you connect an USB keyboard with an USB-OTG adapter that I found, and report back. If you can send the same info through scrcpy maybe you can trigger this behaviour. However I wonder if when the connection is broken this would be able to revert itself.

[inxomnyaa]

Just found this, maybe this can help the development https://github.com/senzhk/ADBKeyBoard. NullKeyboard is my current solution, at least hides it

[fefo-dev]

I forgot to report my tests with OTG.

Seems that GBoard implemented some features for physical keyboards, and with that a bar to harbor those. Kinda neat, but doesn't help with the clutter issue I had in mind. I didn't test it thoroughtly however.

[maddinmcfly]

KDE connect seems to be more of an effort than using null keyboard, which btw works great for me.

[Tedxz]

I think simulating a physical keyboard might be the best solution for many non-English users for typing. When a physical keyboard is connected to the phone, the candidate words are shown without the soft keyboard. The number keys can also be used to choose the word.

[Peter-maximus]

completely agree with having the option to emulate physical keyboard and this way to disable gboard once scrcpy connected to phone...
this way there will be also automatic restore of the original keyboard once usb cable disconnected.
Which unfortunately is not the case if using the workaround script. For that properly working you need firstly close scrcpy and adfterwards disconnect phone...

[rom1v]

Closed by #2632.

Refs #37 (comment)

[IndustrialMuffin]

When connecting over TCP/IP the --hid-keyboard option won't work, so I do this before starting scrcpy to keep the annoying on-screen keyboard from popping up and covering half the screen:

adb -s 192.168.1.140:5555 shell pm disable-user com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox
adb -s 192.168.1.140:5555 shell pm disable-user com.google.android.inputmethod.latin

The on-screen keyboard was disabled with com.google.android.inputmethod.latin but I also had to disable com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox otherwise it made voice typing the keyboard that would start and cover half the screen.

Then after scrcpy is done, I can re-enable those things, but I'll probably just leave the googlequicksearchbox disabled and uninstall any byte wasting updates to it since I never use it:

adb -s 192.168.1.140:5555 shell pm enable com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox
adb -s 192.168.1.140:5555 shell pm enable com.google.android.inputmethod.latin

Obviously if you do this, for the -s option you'll have to use your device's proper serial (ip address and port.) On other devices and android versions the packages might have other names, or you might have other keyboard related packages to look for. To find what those packages are named, you can look through the list from:

adb -s 192.168.1.140:5555 shell pm list packages

A good starting point would be just to look for packages I disabled, or similarly named packages.