[tlug] Japanese input on Debian Testing

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Rant follows (not much help -- I don't mess with distro IM crap on
Linux, I do it myself in XEmacs).

Daniel A. Ramaley writes:

 > A few weeks ago i was playing around, trying to figure out how to fix 
 > this. In the process i discovered that if i set "LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8" 
 > then Japanese input magically started working in (almost) all apps 
 > again! 

I *cannot* believe that they haven't fixed this yet!  The POSIX locale
should be a *hint* (and a very valuable one, because 99% of users are
either monolingual or their other language is English == spellable
with ASCII, but nevertheless *just* a hint).  This has been known to
be broken for multilingual users since the early 1990s. :-(

 > At the time i set up Japanese input, UIM/Anthy seemed to be the most 
 > modern and "correct" way to do it, with SCIM slowly fading away. Now 
 > IBus seems to be the most accepted way to do it; would it be worth 
 > trying to rip out my Japanese input system and rebuild it around IBus?

If IBus fixes the rilly stoopid adhesion to POSIX locales, yes, you
should.

The ideal input manager would provide a popup menu with these options:

  ----------------
  - $DEFAULT (from your locale's LANG/LC_CTYPE variable)
  - $RECENTLY_USED [might be several, should persist across sessions]
  - Direct from keyboard (ASCII + AltGr keys) [XKB extension can
    probably tell you the capabilities, such as QWERTY/Cyrillic, etc]
  - Other languages [submenu]
  ----------------
  - Encoding (the encoding to use when passing text to the program;
              the default of UTF-8 is almost always correct)
  ----------------

or similar.  This menu would preferably be app-local and insinuated
into the app's menus or toobar so it doesn't fuck up ahem^W^W^Waffect
other apps (I really detest this about Mac and Windows).  Better yet,
buffer/document local, but that requires support in the app.