Re: Typing on GuixSD in languages other than English

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Chris Marusich <address@hidden> writes:

> How can I verify that ibus is working on its own?  I've tried installing
> ibus by itself into my profile.  When I do this, I can run ibus-setup,
> and I see a "Japanese" language input option.  This is true even when
> anthy and ibus-anthy are not installed, which surprised me. I had
> expected to find no Japanese language input options at all in ibus-setup
> when anthy and ibus-anthy are not installed.

It’s a bit tricky.  IBus caches input methods and reads them from the
cache.  This is also the reason why IBus breaks whenever it is updated
(see bug #22707).

This cache is in “~/.cache/ibus/bus”.

Another thing you might need to store settings for IBus is to run
“libexec/dconf-service” of the “dconf” package.

Then I had to set

    IBUS_COMPONENT_PATH=$HOME/.guix-profile/share/ibus/component

and the usual

    QT_IM_MODULE=ibus
    address@hidden
    GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus

You will also need

    GUIX_GTK2_PATH=$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/gtk2.0
    GUIX_GTK3_PATH=$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/gtk3.0

so that GTK+ can find the input method modules for ibus in your profile.
Then it should work in a GTK+ application such as “xfce4-terminal”.
Don’t try it in Emacs because it probably won’t work without even more
fiddling.

This is all not nice yet and I’ve only managed to get the Pinyin input
method to work (until the next upgrade).  I haven’t been able to get any
of the included input methods (like Arabic) to work at all.

This needs more work and I’d appreciate some assistance!

~~ Ricardo