I thought you could press and hold the spacebar on a Samsung to get to the settings. Can't remember though. Mrs S has one but I've not had one for a long time.
I use the Microsoft Swiftkey keyboard (just swiftkey till MS bought it), for years now. I just install it, configure it and it's done and I can forget about it. I get all my settings including numbers row, long press special characters and the left/right/up/down keys. Plus a style of keyboard with colours which are easy to read and minimum misses.
Seems to work for me. Can't get it on an iPhone any more but since I don't do crApple stuff that's not an issue.