There is one form of user activity that we have thus far neglected, but which is in many applications, the most used input method of all. That is the soft keyboard that appears when a user taps on an EditText widget:
More often than not it is sufficient only to work with the resultant text that a user has input rather than consider the keyboard itself. However the limited screen size on many Android handsets means that it can be important to control how these keyboards appear in our applications.
There are also a number of things that we can do to help the system select the most appropriate keyboard layout based on our desired input type. Here we will learn how to set soft keyboard appearances to two of three configurations according to our activity's needs and have the system select keyboard layout based on our input type.