Android app and physical keyboard

[JosephErvin]

Hi Tim,

I installed and have been testing the new beta on the play store (2.1.14346). The behavior of the space-bar and Enter keys, and those are working properly now. Thank-you for the quick turn-around.

I've been bouncing back and forth between the Linux and Android versions of the virtual Prime, and there are a few other things that I've noted:

On Linux, CTRL maps to Shift, and Tab maps to ALPHA. In Android, the Tab maps to ALPHA, but CTRL does not map to anything. I have yet to identify a compelling use for these mappings, so I mention this for completeness.

CAPSLOCK on Linux works as expected,...after pressing it, the keyboard CAPSLOCK LED comes on and subsequent keystrokes are in all caps. On the Android App, CAPSLOCK does nothing, so typing in caps requires the use of the normal Shift key. This is a minor inconvenience, but being an engineer, I do use the capslock key for things like variable names, signal names, register names, etc., and that's how I noticed the difference. The CAPSLOCK key does work as expected in all other Android apps I use.

ESC handling on Android is arguably broken, and this one would be really great if it could be fixed. In the virtual Prime app, pressing the ESC key does *two* things: first, it stimulates the key in the upper right of the keyboard called ESC (with shifted function "Clear"). This is the desired behavior. The second thing that happens is that the app then processes the ESC key also as (I think) the "back" function, which invariably returns the Android to the Android home screen, backgrounding the Prime app. This is decidedly unhelpful. It didn't occur to me that the app doesn't do this until I noted that on Linux the ESC key just maps to ESC/Clear, which is nice, so getting that same behavior on Android would be awesome.

By way of background, the ESC keyboard key is mapped variously in different Android apps. Chrome does nothing with it, Gmail uses it as an alias for the "back" button, as do some other apps. The important counter-example is an ssh app I use called "JuiceSSH". This app has a modality to its ESC handling, where it works as a "back" button up to the point where an ssh session is established, and at that point the ESC key is passed through the terminal to the remote system, as one might expect. This is similar to the desired behavior of ESC in the Prime app, i.e. map it to the ESC/Clear key, but don't otherwise do anything "Android-ish" like what happens when the "back" key is pressed.

I hope this helps. Prime on an Android tablet in landscape with a bluetooth keyboard rocks. The app expands a bit to fill the screen, which I love (old eyes), and the ability to interact with it directly with a qwerty keyboard is fabulous.

Thank-you for your outstanding work.

Sincerely,

Joe Ervin