Any easy, generic way in Android to get the root View of a layout?

This answer and comments give one method:

findViewById(android.R.id.content)

Given any view in your hierarchy you can also call:

view.getRootView()

to obtain the root view of that hierarchy.

The “decor view” can also be obtained via getWindow().getDecorView(). This is the root of the view hierarchy and the point where it attaches to the window, but I’m not sure you want to be messing with it directly.