How to Create Borderless Buttons in Android

Question

The Android Design Guidelines say to use borderless buttons (see picture below), but don't really explain how. Someone asked this same question a few weeks ago here: How to create standard Borderless buttons (like in the design guidline mentioned)? and there was an answer marked as "the" answer, but I am still lost and I don't see a way to add comments to a question that has been "closed"

The answer-er said

"Look into the theme attributes buttonBarStyle, buttonBarButtonStyle, and borderlessButtonStyle"

but I still can't figure out how to actually use those things. I Googled around a bit and couldn't find anything so I figured I'd just ask the question again, and hopefully someone can provide a little more detail on how this works.

Answer 1

I thought I had this solved when I looked here a few weeks ago and noticed the answer about using a transparent background but it isn't quite good enough because it prevents the button from being highlighted when pressed.

Also, setting the style to Widget.Holo.Button.Borderless isn't appropriate because it makes the button boundaries to big.

To figure this out once and for all, I check the android source code for the standard Calendar app and found that it uses the following:

android:background="?android:attr/selectableItemBackground"

Doing it this way ensures the button is borderless and the correct size.