GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 354247
Better input method for Gnome
Last modified: 2012-09-21 11:57:36 UTC
Input method is not well integrated in Gnome. I work with many kind of characters, latin, chinese, japanese, latin extension for pinyin and romaji, and in the future, latin extension for vietnamese. In gedit (or others GNOME applications), when a set of characters is needed, you have to right-click and select the input method, including SCIM. Right-click and and browse in the context menu many times is tiring. And this way of select the input method doesn't work with non-gnome application like Firefox or Openoffice. Possibilities of improvement : - The input method might be added in the keyboard applet. - The input method might always appears as an applet in addition to the keyboard applet. - Compare of what is doing in Windows, Mac OS… And copy or make a better input method. … Nota : One feature I like in the actual input method : I use a french keyboard (azertyuiop…), the input method work corrrectly with the azerty french keyboard. Unlike in Windows 2000, the input method is only in qwerty english keyboard. For example, In gnome, with chinese pinyin input method, when I press "a" key, the "a" char appears. In windows 2000, with chinese pinyin input method, when I press "a" key, the "q" char appears. Other information:
Actually, there is an applet for SCIM only. It appears when SCIM method input is selected with right click in Gnome applications. Why not an applet for Input Method only ? - It would include IPA, Thai, chinese input methods, japanese input methods, unicode value… - It would be separated from keyboard layout applet. - There would be a neutral value. In this case, only the characters on the keyboard is usable, depend of the layout (french, US english, arabic…). - The input method value would be memorized for the next reboot. If pinyin IM is selected, at the next reboot, the pinyin IM will be aviable again. - The IM applet could be combined with keyboard layout applet. Input method can work with any keyboard layout. For example, chinese pinyin can work with french keyboard, not only with US english keyboard. - The IM applet would work with all applications : Gnome application, OpenOffice, Firefox, KDE applications… - …
Christin: unfortunately, opening a bug against gnome-desktop won't help in this case. I'll move this bug to gnome-applets since what could make sense would be to modify the keyboard layout applet to handle this. You probably also want to send a mail to gtk-i18n-list at gnome dot org, and talk to the SCIM authors.
Actually the problem is even deeper. It should start with the integration of IM into libxklavier (as a library) and gnome-settings-daemon. So just for the record I'll redirect it to g-s-d. But anyway - it is between me and SCIM folks. And no promises it is going to happen any time soon.
About the idea of one applet for keyboard and one applet for input method, It seems that French typing has a input method, maybe in US English typing too ^^; The use of dead keys means the use of input method ? For example, in the french keyboard, the character Ô (Latin capital letter O with circumplex) can be generated by pressing first dead key ^ (Circumflex accent), then O (Latin capital letter O). It's like if I type japanese characters.
It will be great if it include an unicode keyboard layout editor. Easy to edit (graphical or in text file) Easy to deploy. An good example is Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (msklc http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/msklc.mspx). Maybe it already exist with Keyboard Mapping for Linux (kmfl http://kmfl.sourceforge.net) ? I don't know about Mac OS X… Should I open a bug issue for that ?
I believe a keyboard layout editor is one of the projects for the Google Summer Code this year.
*** Bug 372902 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
For the GTK+ side, we firmly believe that we should use a desktop-wide framework for input methods, such as scim (and ignore other gtk immmodules, pretty much). Thats the reason why we have the setting to hide the input method menu from the context menu of entries and text views. Better integration of the framework with e.g. the keyboard capplet and keyboard indicator would be good, but that requires cooperation from the scim side.
We have better integration with input methods in GNOME 3.6. See: http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2012/09/21/input-sources-in-gnome/