[Development] input method support in Qt5 (linux)

[Knoll Lars]

Hi Gatis,

On Jan 14, 2013, at 1:30 PM, Paeglis Gatis <Gatis.Paeglis at digia.com<mailto:Gatis.Paeglis at digia.com>> wrote:

After  looking at Qt4 / Qt5 source code and doing some internet search I see that ibus plugin has become a part of Qt, where in Qt4 it was a separate plugin hosted somewhere else..

Qt4 offered two options XIM and IBUS, selectable by using 'qtconfig' tool, currently Qt5 has support only for ibus as input method framework (IMF) , which does look like a great IM framework, but is it complete enough to be the only available option in Qt for desktop?

It's very important to the Qt project that input works well for all users without exhausting tweaking, but at the present it is quite frustrating with ibus-setup GUI tool which almost never does what you tell it to do.

It seems that the latest ibus release supports good additions like:

- Improve IME switch UI
- Integrate IME and XKB keyboard layouts. Now ibus can manage both IME and XKB layouts.
etc.

AFAIK linux distros doesn't ship by default this version yet.

I don't know if there has been any decision regarding this.. I was wondering if we should bring back xinput support in XCB plugin? [1]

Input methods on Linux are a mess in general. There's 50 different frameworks for doing them, and somehow this doesn't seem to be consolidating. What we did in Qt 4 was to allow the user to select the backend to use through qtconfig. In Qt 5 we currently only have ibus and maalit. ibus is mainly there, because I needed something to test with and this one was the easiest to implement.

Maybe the best way forward would be to encourage contributions of plugins for other IMEs. But I don't think XIM is going to help us. Afaik, almost nobody uses that one anymore.

Cheers,
Lars



[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xcb/2013-January/008059.html
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