ibus VS Conkey

1.5.29-rc2 was tagged on 9 Nov 2023 [1] and in did not contain "N_("CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I")," in src/ibusunicodegen.h [2].

Commit 228f0a77b2047ade54e132bab69c0c03f0f41aae from 28 Feb 2023 introduced this change instead. It's the same person who tagged 1.5.29-rc2 and committed 228f0a77b2047ade54e132bab69c0c03f0f41aae which is typically an indication the maintainer tar'd their checked out git folder and accidentally included changes not get committed.

[1] https://github.com/ibus/ibus/releases/tag/1.5.29-rc2

[2] https://github.com/ibus/ibus/blob/0ad8e77bd36545974ad8acd0a5...

[2] https://github.com/ibus/ibus/commit/228f0a77b2047ade54e132ba...

On https://github.com/ibus/ibus we can see gtk+ are probably only need for ibus-setup. I would like help to be sure i not miss any step.

I also know input methods work great in Ubuntu (Gnome Wayland) because Gnome supports ibus.

But the article is specifically about incompatibility of input methods among different DEs: Gnome, KDE, wlroots-based environments such as Sway and Hyprland.

After many years, ibus still doesn’t work with wlroots: https://github.com/ibus/ibus/issues/2182

The list of recommended IMEs on Sway are all WIP: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway#...

Most people use fcitx5 with Sway because fcitx5 and Sway both support input method unstable v2. But the article explains that v2 is still not universally supported among wayland DEs, and that’s why it’s problematic.

Have no idea what the daemon does practically, here is the GitHub page.

The F38 beta is currently affected by two (mostly gaming-related) issues that you should be aware of: - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2678 -> a lot of SDL-based games have their fullscreen mode broken. The issue is bisected. - https://github.com/ibus/ibus/issues/2480 -> Keyboard input sometimes gets stuck. Issue has already been identified and we're waiting for an ibus release.

Also, to add to what u/Pizza-Driver said, it seems that ibus is not yet interoperable with the protocol used by Wayland display servers based on wlroots.

I meant ctrl+., but it looks like ibus recently changed their emoji input shortcut back to super+., so the gtk emoji picker should be available via ctrl+. again without requiring changes: https://github.com/ibus/ibus/commit/1520c39d0d6036da725fcecd932883be3f3d3575

Looks like it was changed here: https://github.com/ibus/ibus/commit/1520c39d0d6036da725fcecd932883be3f3d3575

Most of my programs were written for my own use, including:

• A keyboard layout to type numerous non-English letters, punctuation marks and mathematical symbols, originally for Windows but subsequently ported to Linux and Mac [https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey]

• A ‘sound change applier’ for my hobby of language construction, to simulate the process of historical sound change [https://bradrn.com/brassica/]

• A small browser extension to save the full text of all webpages I visit, and a local client to search the database [not open-sourced, apologies!]

The first two have gained a few other users since being released, but I’m pretty sure I’m still the one who uses them the most!

I made my own crossplatform multilingual layout [0]. Although it’s based on QWERTY, it shouldn’t be hard to remap the Linux and Mac versions to any other base layout, since they’re autogenerated from the Windows version.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

The biggest one for me is undoubtedly my custom keyboard layout Conkey [0], which I use constantly (including for typing this very comment). I hate the way the base US layout tends to get distorted in other keyboard layouts with good support for non-ASCII characters, so Conkey had the explicit goal of retaining that basic unshifted layout. I’ve also ended up porting Conkey to Mac and Linux — and given that I’m slowly switching from Windows to Linux, at least the Linux ports have ‘scratched my own itch’ too, which is nice.

Also, I made a utility to archive the full text of every website I view and store it in a SQLite database for searching. It’s proven pretty useful when I want to find something I saw a while ago and then forgot. (I haven’t attempted to open-source it, though — it consists of three entirely separate components, two of which were a pain to set up. I must try to get it into a more usable state one of these days.)

What else… my sound change applier [1], perhaps? Not that I use it very much, because I only need it on those occasions when I want to do some conlanging, which I haven’t had much time for recently. Actually, sound change appliers strike me as being very much a ‘scratch own itch’ type of project in general… sometimes it feels like every conlanger has written their own, and no two can agree on a nice design. Everyone just has their own unique preferred way of doing things.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

For a ~50-year-old program, Emacs’s support for multilingual input — and really, it’s all-round flexibility — continually amazes me! For myself I prefer my own custom keyboard layout [0], because it works outside Emacs too, but I’d happily use Emacs’s own input methods if that would be sufficient.

(In fairness, I have found one weak spot, namely font support… I’ve used ‘unicode-fonts’ [1] with some success, but reportedly it doesn’t work with the latest Emacs. Ah well, it’s at least fairly rare that this becomes a problem in practice.)

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode-fonts

To port my keyboard layout [0] to OSX, I used ‘osxkb’ [1], which outputs an OSX keyboard layout bundle given a simple textual specification file. It was originally created specifically to port Conkey to OSX, but should be entirely usable for other purposes as well.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

> But instead, we're dealing with Latex - a language that overcomplicates the most basic features such as fonts, tables and special characters.

I can’t really argue with the rest of your post, but in my experience this is incorrect. Fonts and special characters are both trivial if you use XeTeX, and tables, though slightly clumsy, are still pretty easy. As an example, see the documentation I wrote for https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey, which makes extremely heavy use of all three features. (As documentation for a keyboard layout, it uses characters from pretty much every corner of Unicode, and accompanying tables of many shapes and sizes to show how to type these characters; I needed to use Gentium in order to render all these characters, with Times New Roman as a fallback. I found that LaTeX could ably handle all of these complecations.)