Changing to a non-english keyboard layout [cupcake support]

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I WILL NOT TAKE ANY RESPONSABILITY FOR WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR PHONE. THIS IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. THIS IS ONLY TRIED ON VERSION 1.1, 1.5 AND 1.6 ON THE DEVELOPER PHONE.

I was fed up with having to hold a and o for my swedish chars, so couple of hours ago I decided to create a swedish layout, and here's how you can do it too. You need an unlocked android phone, such as the Dev1. I will also assume that you have and know how to use the SDK. Connect your phone to your computer and run:

adb shell

In the shell run getprop and find hw.keyboards.0.devname. This for me is trout-keypad-v3. If it's the same for you, do the following, otherwise change accordingly.

adb pull /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-v3.kcm.bin Desktop/

You now have a copy of the keychar-binary on your desktop, make sure to backup it. Open it in a binary editor, and you will find a file coded with an intro followed by lots of data coded as below (not documented, therefore not guarantied, but I feel pretty certain it's right, dots are 0x00):
..char.numberchar.smallchar.bigchar.smallspecial.b igspecial.(keycode+1).
For example, my A looked like:
..A.2.a.A.a.A.?.
What I want it to look like is:
..A.2.a.A.å.Å.?.
If your hex-editor allows that then congrats to you, mine didn't. What I had to do was to use a ascii-table (http://www.ascii-code.com/) and use teh hex code.
00 00 41 00 32 00 61 00 41 00 61 00 41 00 1E 00
...should therefore be...
00 00 41 00 32 00 61 00 41 00 E5 00 C5 00 1E 00

I now have å and Å on my a-button. The next button for me, Z, could be done using the exact same tactic. The fun part came with X. Notice the coding:
00 00 58 00 39 00 78 00 58 00 78 00 00 EF 35 00
The problem here is EF, which is there to make sure that there is not a ... in the middle of the char-code. What we do here is therefore to change the EF to 00 when we change the 00 before it. The result would therefore be:
00 00 58 00 39 00 78 00 58 00 F6 00 D6 00 35 00

Now let's save the file. We can send it to the device with the following code. THIS WILL REPLACE YOUR CURRENT LAYOUT.

adb root
adb remount
adb push trout-keypad-v3.kcm.bin /system/usr/keychars/

For security reasons I would recommend you to always reboot your phone after running adb remount, since this will leave your /system more vulnerable then usual.

Now we can restart the phone, and hopefully it will have a new working layout. If the layout is totally different from yours (for example alt+a is #) that means the encoding of the new file is wrong, and another layout is used. If this happens I recommend you start from the beginning, it doesn't take much time, and small errors can be avoided. You can do as above to reset your old layout:

adb root
adb remount
adb push trout-keypad-v3.kcm.bin.backup /system/usr/keychars/trout-keypad-v3.kcm.bin

My working swedish layout is attached. alt+a => å, alt+z => ä, alt+x => ö.
Hope you will appreciate this as much as I do.

Thanks to Joushou for all the help in #android.

Thank you! this is fantastic. I just have to figure out how this would work with asian fonts

Thanks maybe everybody can put the different layout in this thread.
In France we have azerty layout.

Great thanks!
Would be interesting to be able to SWITCH layouts.

I salute you sir for this easy guide!! Though using notepad ++ i didnt even use hex view! but just chose to see through the null null crap on the screen!! Total matrixe experience! But i definetly vote to get this a sticky for easy goofing with keyboard layouts!

Works great on Haykuro 1.5, changed a to ä and z to ö. Writing finnish on a mobile phone has never been so easy

Tack ska du ha!

Now that would be fun to do the same but by modifying the on-screen keyboard

Just modified the keypad for qwertz to work with haykuro 6hr1.
Download is in the attachment!

Text version of QWERTZ kcm

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Hello-
Does any one have the text version of qwertz.kcm.bin?
Thanks.

Hey,

If I've changed that layout will that effect the virtual keyboard layout in 1.5.
If it's not, how can I change the layout for the virtual keyboard.

regards