English language pack popup characters are not sane

[hoshsadiq]

Hello, I wanted to make some suggestions, and possibly even raise a PR. In the past I have tried to use AnySoftKeyboard but ended up going back to the stock keyboard for a few simple reasons. Though, my biggest hurdle is that the current popup characters are not sane for the English character map.

Most of the characters that come up when opening the popup characters. Specifically characters like ľĺłλ, ŵω, àáâãāäåæąăα. These are not necessary, and take away from the experience. These popup keys should be either replaced by more useful keys or removed.

The normal qwerty_with_symbols keyboard is a massive improvement on the qwerty but it's still not there yet.

If these characters are needed for anything that's not English, and additional language that reflects that specific language should be created.

I suggest we take inspiration from other keyboards and get rid of many of these characters. I think a popular app like SwiftKey/Gboard should be taken as inspiration.

I'd be happy to try and raise a PR based on what I think should be in a keyboard popup characters (and in my opinion, it should eventually become to default), however, I have questions.

• I'm currently not in a position to be able to build Android apps, so I will not be able to test.
• Would it be preferred to replace one of the qwerty keyboards, or would a new keyboard be preferred.
• Regardless of which is the preference, is editing the corresponding .xml enough? Or is there more things to edit?

[Atrate]

For me one of the most appealing features of ASK is the myriad special characters. If you want to make a stripped-down version, create an alternative Eng layout.

[martholomew]

I agree, and we have a pull request on the app's repository to fix this problem and hopefully make everyone happy.