If your mobile has virtual buttons sure on some occasion they have taken away screen space when watching a video or photo or you just wish you had that piece of screen that takes away from you. In this article I am going to explain how to hide them or change them for PIE Launcher. PIE Launcher it's a kind of menu in the form of a half circumference that opens when you touch an area of the screen and in which we can place the back keys, recent applications, home, menu, search, any application we want and even quick settings.
Let's get to work the first thing is to hide the buttons, for this there are 2 methods, one by manually editing a file (which is useful for all mobiles), and the other with an application (not all of them work).
METHOD 1: MANUALLY
Is edit the build.prop file, you need to be root to edit it. We open the directory "/ System" with our favorite explorer and we put in «R&W» mode, that is, read / write to let us edit it. Now we open build.prop and add the line "Qemu.hw.mainkeys = 1" at the end of the file. We save, restart the mobile and that's it. If we want to return to the original state we only have to remove that line from the end of the file.
2nd METHOD: WITH A APPLICATION
If you don't dare to touch a lot there are applications that do the work for you, but keep in mind that not all of them work on all devices:
This is the simplest, but it does not work for example on the Nexus 4. It is necessary root and reboot after hitting hide softkeys.
With this no need to reboot, but root. We will also have a notification from which we can activate or deactivate the buttons (the notification can be deleted). They are not completely hidden, there is a small bar from which we can open the softkeys temporarily, it is very customizable. With the PRO version we can hide them completely.
Once the buttons are hidden, we only have to install the PIE Launcher, it goes inside an application with more utilities and you can fiddle with the other functions if you feel like it (I'll analyze them another day).
The application is called LMT Launcher and you can find it in the official thread of XDA here.
Among the options that PIE Launcher gives us we have to choose the location and distribution of the keys, we can change the color and add access to applications or quick settings.
Remember that to install it we need to activate the "unknown origins" box in settings> security, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask me.
do you need to be root for this?
Si