How to enable Navigation Bar (on-screen soft buttons) on any Android device (ICS+)

If your Android 4.0 or above device has hardware buttons and you fancy the on-screen buttons that show up (or hide) on the Nexus 4 and 5 (and some other devices with no hard buttons), then this article will help you fulfill this little dream of yours in some easy little steps.

Requirements:

• An Android device running Android version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and above
• Root access (yet another perk)
• A few spare minutes
• 10 grams of human brain

Hope you weren’t a big fan of the Brain Surgeon (Dexter). Even if you were, don’t take the last requirement too seriously.

Steps to enable Nav Bar on your Android Device:

• If you don’t already have, download a file explorer with root permissions. Root Explorer and Solid Explorer are my favorites among the paid ones, but the free ES File Explorer will perform the job equally well
• Open whichever File Explorer you will be using to follow this guide.
• Get to the root of your device. Doing so differs from one file explorer to another. On Root Explorer, the default tab is the root of the device.
• Once in root, go to /system.
• Locate the file named build.prop
• Again, depending on which file explorer you are using, open the build.prop file in a text editor. In Root Explorer, this can be done by long pressing the build.prop file and then selecting the “Open in Text Editor” option.
• Get to the end of this file and add the below line there:
            qemu.hw.mainkeys=0
• If, at a later point of time, you feel the urge to disable the nav bar, just change the zero in the line you added above to 1 or simply remove this line.
• Also, you might want to disable your hardware buttons (the ones below your screen that you originally used to navigate). To do so, use Button Remapper or Xposed Additions (an Xposed module)

That should be it. Though I tried to sound as clear as possible, if any of the steps above caused ambiguity in your mind, the YouTube video embedded above might help you out. If you still have any doubt about any of the things we guided you about above, it is pretty simple to comment on this post!