If you wanna open the keyboard from the side, the only way to achieve this is to make your own keyboard View, yes it's hard, but you can find examples of such views on GitHub, fork one of them, and adjust all of the design parameters you need. You'll get your design of the keyboard, and you probably will need to make some tricks around EditText, and override setOnTouchListener or setOnFocusChangeListener to achieve opening your own keyboard, not the system one.