[tlug] Re: UTF-8 Terminal Emulators?

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> writes:

>>>>>> "Mike" == Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com> writes:
>
>     Mike> I personally like the default ``tracktext'' better than
>     Mike> ``bottomleft'', but several people asked me recently whether
>     Mike> this indicator window could be moved a bit more out of the
>     Mike> way, because they found it annoying close to the cursor
>     Mike> position.
>
> Can you get rid of it entirely?


    Kinput2*modeLocation: none

> I think the idea of having status and
> preedit windows with an on the spot method is more than a little
> silly.  The concept goes back to that days of monochrome low-res
> monitors and font poverty; today we can provide graphical or chromatic
> indications of status. (And I can keep track of XIM status in my
> head, anyway....)

For Japanese I want to have at least some indication that a text is in
preedit status and it is important to be able to see where the
conversion region is.  You are right that this can be done with
underlining/typeface/color whatever. But there should be something
which makes it possible to see the differences easily.

I like how it looks in XEmacs when using the Canna interface
with

   (setq canna-use-color t)

(status in the modeline, *very* obvious preedit string and conversion region).
I also like how it works in Galeon, Mozilla, and gvim.

But I don't like the current on the spot implementation in Qt3 where
you can't see the difference between a string which is still in the
preedit stage and a string which is comitted at all.

Mabe I can't track the XIM status in my head as well as you can.
It even happened to me quite a few times that I typed

   Alt-F2  rxvt RET

in KDE and wondered what was broken and 'rxvt' didn't start.  The
reason was that I accidentally hit Shift-Space and got into Japanese
input mode, so 'rxvt' was Japanese input in preedit stage. But it
looked identical like 'rxvt' entered in English mode. 

And when has many windows open, it not easy to remember whether a
window is in English mode or Japanese mode.  I hate it to have to type
a few letters to find out when I move the focus to some window, it's
much nicer if a status is visible somewhere. Personally I like
to have the status close to the cursor, because that's where I
look at.

I think it's good to be able to choose whether one wants to have a
status widget (like with the above X-resource entry for kinput2). It's
not nice that Qt3 ignores this setting and never displays a status
widget.

The invisible conversion region is even worse. One can get used
to a missing status widget and some people might even like it.
But having to guess where the conversion region is makes using
C-i, C-o, Right, and Left with kinput2 almost impossible.

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。