Anysoftkeyboard: Add a button (with e.g. a globe or keyboard icon) for single-tap switching to the "next" IME

[Kaljurand]

Allow the user to switch to the next IME (in a sequence of two or more IMEs) by just tapping once.

It is unlikely that a single IME excels at all aspects of (multilingual) text entry, e.g. it might be great for swiping Livonian, but suck at voice typing Võro. Thus an IME should allow the (multilingual) user to quickly switch to another IME (and the other IME should similarly allow the user to switch back to the initial IME).

Newer versions of Android (v5+) make IME switching simpler than before. One needs to tap the (IME-independent) keyboard icon in the lower (or upper, in case of landscape) right corner and then tap a radio button in the "Change keyboard" dialog that pops up. Even quicker (and with much less cognitive load) is to tap a globe/keyboard button integrated into the active IME. This button should call switchToNextInputMethod with "false" on the 2nd argument.

See also: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/text/creating-input-method.html#Switching

[GeographicCone]

This is a great suggestion, please consider adding it. I use ASK for alphabetic languages but a separate IME for Chinese, and need to switch between the two quickly. IMEs are used in particular for the input of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian scripts, and there are at least 3bn people in the world using any of these languages, so it's not an uncommon scenario.

Having an easy way to switch to the next IME would have made things so much easier. In fact, I thought this was what the "globe" button was supposed to do already but it only toggles between layouts within ASK. To avoid having to redesign the layouts, there could be a setting to replace either the voice input or emoji button with the IME toggle.

Thank you for considering this feature request.

[chpznf]

I strongly agree that it should be implemented. It is a must for people who also type in languages that are not aviable yet and need to switch between them fast. I like AnySoftKeyboard a lot but unfortunately it is not usable to me because of this issue as of now.

[Kaljurand]

Solving this issue has become more important because other mainstream keyboards still do not have it (e.g. SwiftKey), or have recently dropped it (Gboard).