Heliboard causes wrong keyboard layout with external bluetooth keyboard

[Flexmaen]

Hi!

I recently connected an external bluetooth keyboard to my phone. It had a German layout which was ignored by android.

I figured out that I had to switch from HeliBoard to the standard Gboard virtual keyboard. Then the external keyboard worked like expected.

So, I wonder why the virtual keyboard affects the layout of the external one. Also I wonder if this is something that needs to be fixed with Heliboard (which I also set to German layout).

[Helium314]

So Gboard is able to detect whether you have a QWERTZ or a QWERTY keyboard connected?
All I found was https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2415558/how-to-detect-hardware-keyboard-presence and https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/248438/how-to-switch-layout-language-of-external-physical-keyboard-on-coloros-12-1, but that doesn't help at all.

[Flexmaen]

I don't think that Gboard or Android is able to detect anything here. It just uses the keyboard layout matching to the language you have selected for Gboard. The whole handling of external Keyboards in Androids seems a bit awkward to me since I don't understand why it should make a difference wheater I chose a 3rd party app for my virtual keyboard or not.

However it seems that the virtual keyboard decides the layout for the external keyboard and so it seems that it depends on Heliboard to fix this.

[Helium314]

So I guess HeliBoard needs to have some sort of character conversion tables for a bunch of keyboard layouts,and then try guessing the correct one from the current language.
If the conversion tables are as simple as I hope, and the tables are available somewhere in an easily readable format, such conversion could be implemented.

[Flexmaen]

That sounds great!
Although I still think it's trange that Androids handles external Keyboards this way.

[antroyd]

Has this issue ever been fixed? I am still experiencing it, but I dare to claim it is not entirely a layout issue: In my case, the letters are displayed just fine, but certain sign keys provide a character mismatch when using the shift key, e.g. SHIFT+. falsely provides > instead of : while SHIFT+- provides correctly _. Looks to me like a mismatch in the character conversion table.

[antroyd]

Could it be an option to peak how other keyboard apps are resolving this issue? I have now additionally installed Fossify Keyboard und use this one with my bluetooth keyboard without any problems.

[Helium314]

I am still experiencing it

Which version are you using? There were changes in 3.3 and 3.6-beta1

[antroyd]

The issue appears to be resolved with version 3.6-beta1. (Many thanks.)