[slemaire]

I'm basically at my wits end here, I feel like I've tried everything. I need to open an app on my Nexus 7 with a hardware key press.

-External Keyboard Helper will do it but disables the soft keyboard when in use (and also stops working when using any other input source)

-Tasker will only detect two hardware buttons, long search and camera. I can get both of these buttons by editing the Generic.kl file and binding them to F1 and F2 or something, but tasker still refuses to detect them.

-I can start the search app with the search key, but tasker seems to have no functionality to detect when another app starts, so I can't just piggyback off of that one.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

[Rukbat]

Why a hardware keyboard? You need keys not on the standard Android keyboards? Try Hacker's Keyboard - it's a standard PC keyboard when it's in landscape mode - active Ctrl and Alt keys, the works.

As for detecting when an app starts, the closest you're going to get right now is an Application event, and that triggers when an app becomes the foreground app, not when it starts. (Task/Perform Task will allow you to fire one task from another.)