Yeah, I miss the ability to get a keyboard whenever you wanted one with the menu button. Without that, I guess your idea of showing/hiding the keyboard with some kind of pull-out tab would be a good start.

The harder but perhaps more useful behavior would require detecting whether the search UI is on screen and showing/hiding the keyboard when it makes sense to do so. Hijack screen-scrapes the display to detect whether any player menu is up, but it doesn't know the difference between the playlist menu, the search menu, etc, and doing that kind of screen-scraping remotely from a PNG image would be a bit of a pain.

The search button idea could also work, but it'd have to stay in the keyboard mode on successive search button presses until either OK or Cancel are pressed to perform/cancel the search. This could potentially get out of sync with what's actually on the player, but if you had a way to get that UI menu status from Hijack (I don't see it anywhere in /proc, so you'd probably have to get it from a daemon running on the empeg) you could use that to detect when the menu goes away, hide the keyboard, and go back to showing the keyboard when Search is pressed.