Long press modifier (Shift for capitals) has no settings UI since the Modifiers screen was removed

[djbclark]

Use case

People whose last physical-keyboard phone was a BlackBerry 10 device (Q10, Passport, Classic) are used to one habit above all: holding a letter key types its capital. On PhysiBoard a held letter currently always opens the device Alt layer, and there is no way to change that.

What happened to the setting

The preference for this still exists (long_press_modifier, values alt/shift/variations/sym…) and the input path still honours it (AltSymManager, InputEventRouter, StatusBarController read it on every key). But:

• ef222dc deleted the Modifiers screen, which was the only settings UI for it ("keep their defaults and stop being adjustable").
• The paged tutorial that also had a Long Press Modifier dropdown is no longer reachable: TutorialActivity now always shows OnboardingScreen.

So the only remaining way to set it is root access to the app's shared_prefs, or a custom build.

Proposal

Bring it back as an opt-in screen rather than the old Modifiers page: Keyboard → Long Press behaviour, with

• Long Press — the hold time, 50–1000 ms, default unchanged at 300 ms
• Long Press Modifier — Alt (Punctuation) / Shift (Capitalization) / Variations (Diacritics) / Sym (Symbols), default unchanged

with both rows discoverable through settings search. Nothing changes for anyone who never opens the screen.

I have this working on a Titan 2 Elite and will open a PR against this issue.

[djbclark]

#10 implemented this on the 2.x code and was closed automatically when main moved to the 3.0 clean-room branch, so it cannot be reopened against main, and 2.x is crash-fixes only now. I am treating this issue as the tracking item for 3.0 instead.

What 3.0 needs is a settings row for long_press_modifier (and the long_press_threshold slider). The spec already keeps the behaviour: keys-and-modifiers.md §8.2 keeps every mode including shift, and its §18 table lists a "(long-press selector)" for the row. But settings-catalog.md §2.4 records it as "No screen in 2.x" and §13 leaves it "undecided per row". #12 proposes Keep/Drop wording that names the screen: Keyboard > "Long Press behaviour", hold-time slider plus an Alt / Shift / Variations / Sym picker. Placement and naming are yours to change.

For anyone on 2.x meanwhile, the implementation from #10 is on my fork, rebased on legacy-2.x 2.0.7: https://github.com/djbclark/physiboard/tree/long-press-modifier-setting