With the hundreds of options for Keyboards on Android, I’ve always been one who prefered the stock Froyo and Gingerbread ones.
Never really getting on with Swype (and it’s clones), missing some of the shortcuts with others.

However recently in the market place I came across Hacker’s Keyboard.

For starters this keyboard doesn’t actually doing any Hacking, it just has buttons for everything.

Whilst Ctrl, Alt and Esc won’t do much in your normal apps when logging in to a Terminal shell they are vital.
To get around these missing buttons in the past apps have offered the ability to press the trackball, however on the times I’ve tried I always ended up stuck in vi with disconnection the only escape route. Not only that by the Samsung Galaxy S II does even have a trackball.

But now with Hacker’s Keyboard and ConnectBot I can log in to my webserver, traverse the directories using the tab key to autocomplete, vi to edit the code and finish of with Esc : wq to save and exit.

The cursor keys allow me to move around the screen or bring up old commands and I no longer need to think about getting a bluetooth keyboard.

The code for the keyboard is based on the stock Gingerbread one, and in portrait mode is pretty similar, so for me it’s win win.

If you’ve got an Android phone, download it today

Reading this on your mobile download it in the Market now.