[cartman.dos]

@jurialmunkey , @sualfred , I'll give it ago hopefully this weekend.

I was thinking of a always visible small keyboard layout with edit control to change content without previous keyboard dialog pop-up.


But never messed with these kind of controls before...
(skin helper has a very similar custom search that i could expand upon but its slow AF and having it work in kodi natively would be amazing)
any tips?

Unsure, but theoreticaly you can define an include for "dialogkeybord.xml" and use that via onload there.
So that it'll overlay your (in that case left side ) of your "search window result" which also need to ActivateWindow(virtualkeyboard)
[ (virtualkeyboard) - WINDOW_DIALOG_KEYBOARD - 10103 - DialogKeyboard.xml) ]

Only contra is , that you need to press enter, to have the lookup/results show up. 

Yeah my initial thoughts were to use an alternative layout in dialogkeyboard, switch by visible cond. so its a dialog on top of the custom window, but i'm not sure how this is handled in kodi and if it will allow me to have a constantly showing keyboard.