IBus and Qt Applications

General system
1

A recent post by @jonathon introduced me to IBus, a input method mainly for Asian writing systems, but also for emojis and other Unicode characters. It seems nice enough to explore it in more detail.

I followed the Arch Wiki, which involved three steps:

  1. installing the ibus package with pacman:
  2. setting the following environment variables:
    GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus
QT_IM_MODULE=ibus
XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
  3. running the ibus-daemon, either alone:
    ibus-daemon -drxR
    or with a KDE Input Method Panel as frontend:
    ibus-daemon -drxR --panel=/usr/lib/kimpanel-ibus-panel

On KDE Plasma the above steps somewhat work, apart from few minor issues: e.g. the switching between keyboard layouts using the shortcut Meta+Ā Ā SpaceĀ Ā  is broken (it displays the list of keyboard layouts, but switching between them does nothing), and other little things like thatā€¦

However, my main issue is with emoji input (which is the main reason I am exploring this program). The input method is this: press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+E, type the name of the emoji, press Ā Ā SpaceĀ Ā  to preview the emoji and then EnterĀ Ā .

This works fine in many applications (like Firefox, for example this frog: :frog:, Alacrity, LibreOffice Writerā€¦), except it does nothing in Qt applications, the keyboard shortcut is not registered at all.

As it happens, the two programs (Konsole and Kate) I would like to use this in the most are both Qt applicationsā€¦

After fiddling with it the whole night, I am now quite exhausted. Does anyone have any experience using IBus on KDE?

2

@zangoku have some ibus experience as far as i remember, maybe heā€™ll help :upside_down_face:

3

This kind of sounds like something else is overriding QT_IM_MODULE. :thinking:

4

Doesnā€™t look like it is:

~šŸø echo $QT_IM_MODULE
ibus
1 Like
5

I use fcitx for asian input instead of ibus. You could always try to give fcitx a shotx but I am not sure how it works for emojis.

6

The other idea I have is that thereā€™s another keyboard shortcut thatā€™s grabbing CTRL+ALT+Eā€¦ I donā€™t use KDE though. :pensive:

7

Iā€™ve had a bit more time to look into it and I noticed that when I start the daemon from the interactive shell session in Konsole, I have to close Konsole. When I reopen it, the keyboard shortcut works in it.

If I start the daemon from a script in ~/.config/autostart-scripts that does nothing. :confused:

Iā€™ll figure it out, now I know that it can work in Qt apps, thatā€™s the only thing that matters.

3 Likes
8

Hey,

Sorry, to reopen an old thread but I am also having issues with ibus/fcitx wrt asian language inputs. I am having the same issues that you have but on xmonad :upside_down_face:. The ibus-daemon doesnā€™t start automatically despite writing a auto start file in ~/.config/

The content of my autostart file.

[Desktop Entry]
Exec=ibus-daemon -drx
Icon=system-run
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application

Wondering if you found a more permanent solution?

9

I was able to install ibus but canā€™t run the last step which is ibus-setup. Something is wrong with my python (miniconda). Keeps giving me this error.

I did install the Gtk3 package required using conda. conda install -c conda-forge gtk3

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/ibus/setup/main.py", line 38, in <module>
    gi_require_version('IBus', '1.0')
  File "/home/henri/miniconda3/lib/python3.9/site-packages/gi/__init__.py", line 126, in require_version
    raise ValueError('Namespace %s not available' % namespace)
ValueError: Namespace IBus not available
10

switched to fcitx which solved the issue.

content of my /etc/environment file

GTK_IM_MODULE=fcitx
QT_IM_MODULE=fcitx
XMODIFIERS=@im=fcitx