Option to hide the "Pill"

[BetterWaifus]

Could you add an option to make the white pill displayed for gesture navigation invisible? This does not mean getting rid of the space reserved for it. Just removing the eyesore.

[thestinger]

We'd likely be willing to accept a pull request but we won't work on it ourselves beyond reviewing that, and the implementation needs to be done very cleanly following an existing example without us having to micromanage it to get it done correctly.

[randoentity]

I'm also interested in this. I did a bit of looking around and LineageOS has this feature. I'm sorry if this is obvious, but if it is you might save me some time digging into it further. In LineageOS the string is called "Navigation hint" and the definition of the variables is there, but I don't know where to look for the actual implementation yet.

https://github.com/LineageOS/android_packages_apps_Settings/blob/lineage-21.0/src/com/android/settings/gestures/GestureNavigationSettingsFragment.java

Search for string: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3ALineageOS%2Fandroid_packages_apps_Settings%20navigation%20hint&type=code

In GrapheneOS: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_packages_apps_Settings/blob/14/src/com/android/settings/gestures/GestureNavigationSettingsFragment.java

[thestinger]

@randoentity We're not going to do what they do because it breaks compatibility through essentially forcing edge-to-edge support without apps declaring it. We aren't going to take an approach which requires assorted workarounds.

[randoentity]

@thestinger thanks for the explanation!

[Redsandro]

I didn't know this was problematic. I never experienced an issue on LineageOS, but I don't know how much effort went into that. Honestly I don't understand why Google themselves did not add an option to "disable Groundhog Day mode". It's like a permanent tutorial, a reminder to "press c to crouch", an UX design feature for the guy in the movie "Memento" so he can remember to use gestures despite losing his memory every few minutes.

[thestinger]

Removing the reserved space for apps not marked as edge-to-edge compatible is what's problematic. Hiding the transparent white navigation hint is not problematic. The reserved space you see in many apps is only because they aren't marked edge-to-edge compatible which often requires them to make changes. Android has to preserve backwards compatibility and tries to avoid breaking legacy apps to force support for something unimportant like this. They do force many changes, but for more important things.