Hi all,
More a rant than anything, but may be useful for someone else.
TL;DR I've discovered that I needed to set XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus to have
my US intl. (with dead keys) working properly. And the problem is not
st, but the user (me).
I feel a little bit less n00b, but still I'm puzzled about this, so I
post it here in the hope that other n00bs like me may take advantage.
For quite a long time I had to use a full fledged desktop (Plasma) for
some project needs, in the meanwhile I've been forced to use Red Hat,
that is still 3 years behind in terms of software and libraries, so
neither KDE or Gnome where an option, and I went back to i3wm where
I've started to have strange keyboard issues.
I use a US international layout with dead keys, and those dead keys
were totally DEAD, pressing and releasing wasn't doing anything at all.
In the beginning I thought that was i3, but after some hours debugging
I saw that in some Gnome applications the keyboard was working.
I put all of my attentions on st, and at a certain point I started to
bisect it commit by commit, till I found that this commit was the
source of my headaches:
commit 26cdfebf31f024e331429e482b1ee342708888e3
Author: Quentin Rameau <quinq@fifth.space>
Date: Sun Feb 2 21:47:19 2020 +0100
x: fix XIM handling
Do not try to set specific IM method, let the user specify it with
XMODIFIERS.
If the requested method is not available or opening fails, fallback
to
the default input handler and register a handler on the new IM
server
availability signal.
Do the same when the input server is closed and (re)started.
And my bad, I didn't read carefully the log message, but I was starting
to understand the changes and trying to propose a patch :-D that was
almost removing XIM support.
But as I am bad as a C developer (I'm a suckmore dev, I write GUIs), I
finally decided to read the git log message. And there was Light!
I finally remembered about an awful keyboard icon I had in i3.
Found some info about the XMODIFIERS, put these in /etc/environment
GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus
QT_IM_MODULE=ibus
XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
And I started to enjoy again a clean WM, probably this apply to dwm as
well...
Most distros now hide these things providing everything a user may
need, and when it misses something most of the users are lost. For thsi
I prefer much more *BSD or old style Gentoo where you must understand
before to type any command...
Sorry it was long, I hope you don't mind my excitement in something
that surely, for most of you it's obvious.
Kind regards
--
Antenore
