Saturday, January 19, 2013

Enable Soft-Keys on Samsung Galaxy Note 2

device-2013-01-19-014319I wanted to enable the soft-keys on my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 after switching to the new nightly builds of CyanogenMod 10.1.

I found that it is actually rather easy to turn them on. It just requires modifying the build.prop with the following:

qemu.hw.mainkeys=0


If you want to disable them later just change it to:


qemu.hw.mainkeys=1


After you modify the build.prop you have to reboot for the changes to take affect.


This change will turn on the soft-keys, but it does not disable the hardware keys. But you can disable them too. You have to open /system/usr/keylayout/Generic.kl and comment out the following by added a '#' to the beginning of the line.


# key 158	BACK
# key 139 MENU


The home key is located in /system/usr/keylayout/gpo-keys.kl


# key 172	HOME	WAKE


To turn these back on just remove the '#' and reboot.

4 comments:

  1. I did this but now I can't go back to the normal behaviour... How to re enable them... I removed the # sign and rebooted... Doesn't work... Help???

    ReplyDelete
  2. set qemu.hw.mainkeys=0 back to qemu.hw.mainkeys=1 and uncomment the "keys" and reboot.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Please help, I'm trying to disable them but whenever I add # at the beginning of the line, it doesn't save. It gives me am error telling me it can't save. Please help me

    ReplyDelete
  4. Synyster, you need to edit the file with a tool that has root access.

    ReplyDelete

Enable Soft-Keys on Samsung Galaxy Note 2

device-2013-01-19-014319I wanted to enable the soft-keys on my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 after switching to the new nightly builds of CyanogenMod 10.1.

I found that it is actually rather easy to turn them on. It just requires modifying the build.prop with the following:

qemu.hw.mainkeys=0


If you want to disable them later just change it to:


qemu.hw.mainkeys=1


After you modify the build.prop you have to reboot for the changes to take affect.


This change will turn on the soft-keys, but it does not disable the hardware keys. But you can disable them too. You have to open /system/usr/keylayout/Generic.kl and comment out the following by added a '#' to the beginning of the line.


# key 158	BACK
# key 139 MENU


The home key is located in /system/usr/keylayout/gpo-keys.kl


# key 172	HOME	WAKE


To turn these back on just remove the '#' and reboot.