Do your hardware keyboards behave properly when using with Android devices?

LunatiqueRob

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Sep 30, 2013
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For those of you who do plug your hardware keyboards into Android mobile devices (using OTG adapter), have you noticed that some keyboard shortcuts for text navigation/editing don't work properly? I'm finding that's the case on my Galaxy Note 3, and I've tried with three different keyboards.

Some examples of strange behavior:

L-Ctrl+Left/Right arrows - Normal behavior
R-Ctrl+Left/Right arrows - Jumps to beginning/end of the line, instead of jumping one word at a time.

L-Ctrl+Up/Down arrows - Does nothing at all, not even moving the cursor one step up or down.
R-Ctrl+Up/Down arrows - Jumps one screen up and down (same as Page Up/Down), instead of one paragraph at a time.

I know that some keyboard shortcuts that work on a PC or Mac don't work on Android or iOS, but what's strange here is that the left and right Ctrl keys behave differently, while other text editing/navigation shortcuts related to the ones above do work correctly on both sides of the keyboard (shift activated shortcuts work fine on both sides of the keyboard).

Anyone else have this problem? Is it consistent on all Android devices and apps?
 

Rukbat

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Feb 12, 2012
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If you're using a terminal app ported from Linux, the keyboard should work pretty normally. If you're using an app that normally uses an on-screen keyboard (OSK), you'll notice that there are no Ctrl keys on an OSK (and no arrows on most of them), so the apps aren't designed to use the Ctrl-Arrow key combination. They're getting a keycode that doesn't mean to the app what it means to you. It's inconsistent, because you're giving the app something it's not designed to interpret, so each app is going to misinterpret the code differently. It will probably be consistent across devices for the same app.
 

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