Samsung DeX supporting

[jonydhub]

Hello! First of all, thank you very much for your app, it's really cool, and I enjoy using and recommending it.

Will you add support for two languages in Samsung DeX mode? Currently, only one language is available, and I cannot use hotkeys as I can with the default keyboard. Perhaps you could add this feature.

Also on the phone, when I type a letter and two digits together, the first digit is automatically removed. How can I fix this?

[DevEmperor]

Thank you — and these turned out to be two very different things, so they now have an issue each:

• Autocorrect swallows the digit in words like top10: suggest() never got the digit guard spell() has #311 — the disappearing digit. Our bug, root cause found, already fixed on main; it ships in the next release.
• Samsung DeX / physical keyboards: only one language, because Dictate declares a single system subtype and maps no hardware keys #312 — DeX / physical keyboards. A real gap, with three questions for you at the end.

The digit

Reproduced, and your report was too modest: it doesn't take two digits. One digit at the end of a word is enough — top1 followed by a space comes out as top , and top1. as top.. You only noticed it with two digits because the second one is what collects the damage the first one had already set up.

What happens is that a digit is the end of a word on one side of the keyboard and the middle of one on the other. The key handler treats every non-letter as a finished word and asks autocorrect whether it wants to swap something in first — but the composing region is decided by ICU, and Unicode's word rules keep a letter and a following digit together. So the correction engine is handed the whole top1 and reads it as a misspelling of top, which is one deletion away and common enough to be swapped in silently. Then your 0 lands after it: top0. Same for covid19 → covid9, day15 → day5.

The spell checker has refused words with digits in them since the day it was written — versions, model numbers, codes are not misspellings. The suggestion side simply never got that rule. It has it now, as one rule both sides call.

DeX

Here is what I can tell you from the code, and where I need your help.

Dictate handles exactly three keys from a physical keyboard — space, enter, shift. Everything else goes straight through to the app, which turns it into a character using Android's layout for that keyboard, not Dictate's. So Dictate's own languages currently have no say in what a hardware key writes.

As for why only one language is offered: Dictate registers a single, language-less subtype with Android and keeps its languages in its own settings instead. Since Android 14 the physical keyboard layout is chosen per IME subtype — with one subtype there is one layout, and the system's switch shortcut has nothing to cycle. Samsung's keyboard registers one subtype per language, which is why it can switch. That is the likely mechanism, not a verified one: I have no DeX device to test on.

Which is where the three questions come in:

1. What Android version is the DeX device running? 14 is the threshold where layouts became subtype-bound.
2. By "hotkeys", do you mean only switching language, or also Ctrl+A/C/V/X/Z and the cursor shortcuts? The latter go to the app untouched and should already work — if they don't, that is a separate and much smaller bug.
3. In Settings → System → Physical keyboard → (your keyboard), is a Russian layout offered at all while Dictate is the active keyboard?

In the meantime there is a partial workaround: Settings → Advanced → Physical keyboard → Show on-screen keyboard keeps the soft keyboard visible while a hardware keyboard is attached. The language can then be switched with the globe key, and what you type on the on-screen keys follows it — the hardware keys still won't.

[jonydhub]

Thanks, this matches what I found via ADB.

1. The device is running Android 16 with Samsung DeX.

2. By hotkeys I initially meant switching the physical keyboard language: Ctrl+Space, Shift+Space and Alt+Shift do not switch the layout while Dictate is the active IME.

However, it may not be limited to language switching. For example, I have also confirmed that Ctrl+Enter does not work with Dictate. I haven't systematically tested Ctrl+A/C/V/X/Z and the cursor shortcuts yet, so I don't want to claim that those work correctly.

If useful, I can test a list of physical keyboard shortcuts and report exactly which ones work and which ones don't.

3. Yes, Ukrainian and English physical keyboard layouts are available on the device. With Samsung Keyboard active, Android can switch between them normally.

I also checked adb shell dumpsys input. For Samsung Keyboard, Android has separate subtype-to-layout mappings:

• English subtype → keyboard_layout_english_us
• Ukrainian subtype → keyboard_layout_ukrainian

For Dictate's subtype (1194579842), Android reports:

layoutDescriptor = null

This seems to support your theory that the single language-less subtype is the reason Android has nothing to cycle between for the physical keyboard.

My current workaround is to use Tasker: when a Bluetooth keyboard connects, I switch the default IME to Samsung Keyboard; when it disconnects, I switch back to Dictate.

If useful, I can provide the relevant dumpsys input sections for the Logitech POP Keys keyboard.

There is one more issue I've noticed after using Dictate as my main keyboard for a while.
Typing accuracy on the on-screen keyboard seems noticeably worse than with Samsung Keyboard or Gboard on the same device. When I type at my normal speed, I make significantly more typos in Dictate — especially accidental presses on neighboring letters.

This doesn't seem to be only an autocorrect/suggestion issue. It feels like Samsung Keyboard and Gboard are better at interpreting slightly inaccurate taps, while Dictate tends to enter the literal neighboring key more often.

I can reproduce this simply by typing the same text at roughly the same speed in Dictate, Samsung Keyboard and Gboard.
Is FlorisBoard/Dictate currently doing any touch correction — for example, adjusting key hitboxes dynamically or using the surrounding word/context to infer which neighboring key was intended?

If not, would this be something you would consider improving? Dictation in Dictate is excellent, but for me this difference in normal typing accuracy is currently quite noticeable compared with Samsung Keyboard/Gboard.
If it would help, I can also do a more controlled comparison and provide examples of the same text typed with all three keyboards.