= Description =
IM setup in Plasma is confusing because users are supposed to hand-pick the right components in the IM stack. Searching for documentation often lands you in outdated tutorials suggesting Fcitx and SCIM (both of which seem unmaintained).
In the case of Japanese, I found by trial and error that the combination of ibus and mozc works decently, and kimtoy could be used to autostart ibus-daemon at login time, but it also replaces the ibus applet with one that didn't work for me. I also discovered kimpanel, which provides yet another UI for switching between input methods.
Adding to the confusion, distros offer custom IM configuration tools that often don't integrate well with Plasma. For instance, Fedora has [[ https://bitbucket.org/tagoh/imsettings | imsettings ]].
= Proposed changes =
- Provide a merged tray icon for keyboard layouts and current input method. Having both is very confusing, and users don't know the difference between layouts and input methods, they just want to switch between "type in English" or "type in Thai".
- Remove any mentions of legacy input methods: Fcitx, SCIM, XIM, etc.
- Work with IBus maintainers to provide a Plasma applet equivalent to ibus-ui-gtk3
- Deprecate kimtoy, or improve the tray UI and make the configuration UI into a kcm
- Update the Keyboard Layouts kcm to allow launching the external IM configuration UI (ibus-setup?)
- Work with distros to ensure all the required packages are either pre-installed or can be installed with one click when needed (via PackageKit / Discover)
- Maybe: turn on IBus by default for all users, with pre-configured methods such as emoji and unicode input
- Maybe: integrate [[ https://github.com/mike-fabian/ibus-typing-booster | IBus Typing Booster ]] (suggests word completions and next words from a dictionary)
= Relevant links =
- [[ http://www.eikehein.com/kde/Input_Methods_in_Plasma_5.pdf | Input Methods in Plasma 5 ]] (Akademy 2017 talk by @hein)
= How we know we succeeded =
Users stop asking how to setup input methods on forums and bug trackers. Tutorials become obsolete because the steps to configure a new IM are obvious and discoverable.