Quick note re: some post a page or so back: For me, X-Term enters text inconsistently (meaning, it always doesn't show text already there, but sometimes it enters the new text, sometimes it doesn't). That's probably why the above poster says it doesn't work at all. Because sometimes it takes a few tries, and I can't even see a completely coherent pattern for how/why it works/doesn't work in X-Terminal. Just sometimes it adds the text, sometimes it doesn't.

Now, more current replies/ideas:

I don't know about swapping buttons around, but it's certainly an option - however, I say if you're going to swap buttons, it's probably good to implement settings to configure whether those buttons are swapped at the end-user level.

Also, I'm not sure how hildon works, so maybe I have to request this at the Hildon level, but it would be great if you could keep the top left button visible/press-able when in the vkb. Meaning, the one that you use to 'back out' of a window and zoom out to the Task Switcher or whatever it's called. (The same one where the key to go to the app menu is, depending on what you have in the foreground/background.)

The reason I'm not sure if this is feasible is if you could leave a VKB instance open in one program/window, and navigate to another window with text boxes, I'm not sure if Hildon's input method and respective APIs are built to accept multiple VKBs at once. It's possible it simply can only remember one vkb instance at the same time, so opening a new vkb in another window would lose what the other one's trying to enter, or something like that. But if this vkb can pull off remembering multiple instances of itself open at once, that would be a significant strength in my opinion over the original (on top of the qwerty/alphanumeric + portrait/landscape superiority it already has) - being able to go from one window, to, say, quickly read some web page you're referencing (but don't want to copy-paste) without having to close the vkb, do the window switching, and then open the vkb again in the window you just closed it in, would be far more comfortable/fluent from a usability stand point.

Also, I just noticed another possibility for a couple extra buttons in the qwerty vkb, if you really have any you wish to add, and one I would recommend for the portrait:

The alpha-numeric/qwerty, Abc/abc/ABC, and smartwrite on-off selecting button, could be reserved for only one of the qwerty keyboard's buttons - meaning, right now you have shift and the number/symbol keys - the one that either capitalizes/shifts the letters/symbols visible, and the one that takes you to the numbers/symbols characters. Great so far. Now, during normal typing, does everyone really want to be able to switch between alphanumeric and qwerty, Abc/abc/ABC modes, etc, all the time? I'd presume not so often that it has to be on every one of the qwerty pages. So you could actually make the mode-switching button + shift key be something else, and mode-switching + 123 key be something else. POSSIBLY mode-switching + shift + 123 key, and maybe even work in the accent letters key for an extra couple of combinations for more keys. Don't know what you'd do with all of those, but the point is the option is there. (Also, I personally think you could swap space and enter keys - the space gets used more often than the enter key anyway, by the average user, but currently it's aligned slightly to the right, which means left/right-hand use is forced to be different - I'm ambidextrous, and use either hand for most tasks interchangeably, so I tend to notice this a bit more, and I know left-handed people are typically inconvenienced by such things anyway. But it's not a major issue, and I'd leave it low on your to-do list unless you agree and can change it in like 5 seconds.)

Now, my recommendation for alphanumeric - if this isn't already implemented in some way that I don't know about - is include the new-line (enter) character as the third character on the 0 key. That way you have space, 0, enter. Because right now I can't find an enter key in alpha-numeric, and that seems like a natural place to put it. Actually, you can probably arrange the key 'order' as space, enter, 0, (in case the order determines what key is used for a button when you switch the alphanumeric keyboard to just numbers). The only difficulty I see is with smart-type - but I suspect it should be possible to add a dictionary entry, that says that 2 (or whatever number you feel is appropriate, but 2 is probably fine) spaces is to be converted to a new-line character when in smart-type. That way smart-type auto-converts two spaces to an enter, non-smart-type has enter as the second character in the 0 key, so two quick 0s yield the enter key, and you don't have to lose any more space to new buttons.

Hope some of the above are useful.