Davyd Madeley: input managers and other stuff (SCIM)

BeCome

So, after a lot of pain trying to debug why GDM refused to start on my desktop tonight, I discovered it was something to do with SCIM, the input manager. I can only assume SCIM was trying to load itself to handle any input manager-ing that might have to be done for my login (I dread to think) and was somehow failing miserably. Do other people use SCIM, and how do they work around this problem? Alternatively, what X Input Manager do you use instead? SCIM has this irritating box that it wants to put in the bottom right corner, as well as the notification icon. I couldn't seem to turn that off.

I've been thinking for a while now, that while pluggable XIMs are cool, we really do need a more GNOME-based solution. Let's call it GIM. In my opinion, GIM should integrate seamlessly with gswitchit (the keyboard layout switcher). I mean gswitchit شمقثشغ شممخصس عس فخ فغحث هى شقشﻻهؤ (already allows us to type in Arabic) (note, this it not actual Arabic, seeing as I don't know Arabic, instead this is me typing in Querty with gswitchit thinking in Arabic), so why can't we also be able to select something like Chinese, using the common input methods for chinese (if you haven't seen the way they do chinese on querty, you type in the pinyan for a character, and then select the right character from a selection). In Apple-land, one keyboard indicator services everyone, and it's really rather impressive that it just works. I notice that Gswitchit has plugin support, perhaps it would be possible to have dynamic integration of an input manager like SCIM into gswitchit, without requiring any extra panels or notification icons. The input manager should probably also be easier to configure. Perhaps something already exists like this. I just want our desktop experience to be truly world class for our International friends, plus I want Stephanie to be able to sit at a machine like this to write her thesis (in which I can only assume there will be chinese characters) and for it to be as easy as her Macintosh.



http://www.livejournal.com/users/davyd/132439.html