I have a very peculiar use case for a

TextField

/ text input. I'm building an app for mobile phones that have hardware barcode scanners. When the user scans a barcode, the actual barcode is transmitted as a sequence of key events. In a

View

world I have an

EditText

that is focused, so when a user scans a barcode, its value is entered into the

EditText

and I can just do

editText.text.toString()

to get the value of the scanned barcode + the user sees what was scanned. As the user is expected to use the barcode scanner for input, the on-screen software keyboard must not be shown. This was easy to do with

EditText

. Now I wanted to replicate the same functionality in Compose using a

TextField

. Unfortunately, I can't find a way how to do that. If you specify

readOnly = true

, then the

CoreTextField

doesn't use the

TextInputService

and the TextField is not listening for any input key events. It seems that

readOnly

is suited for cases where we'll just display data, like a Calculator app. Then I went deeper into `CoreTextField`'s implementation and decided to try another approach. I created a composable that didn't use any

TextField

. Instead, I got a reference to the

LocalTextInputService.current

, created an

EditProcessor

instance and called

startInput()

like so:

@Composable
fun ScannerInput() {    
    val textInputService = LocalTextInputService.current
    var textFieldValue = remember { mutableStateOf(TextFieldValue()) }
    val editProcessor = EditProcessor()

    textInputService?.startInput(
        value = textFieldValue.value,
        imeOptions = ImeOptions.Default.copy(singleLine = true),
        onEditCommand = {
            val newValue = editProcessor.apply(it)
            Log.d("Scanner", "onEditCommand: $newValue")
        },
        onImeActionPerformed = {
            Log.e("Scanner", "onImeActionPerformed: $it")
        }
    )
}

The thing is that down into the implementation of

TextInputService

, it's making a call to

showSoftwareKeyboard()

and the keyboard is shown 😞 Any idea what else I could try, as this is a core part of my app and the requirement is strictly never to show the on-screen software keyboard 🤔