Moving kimpanel to plasma-desktop

[Aleix Pol]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 10:08 PM, Eike Hein <hein at kde.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> kimpanel is our frontend to IMEs such as ibus and fcitx. It (or an
> equivalent) are necessary to successfully input a number of writing
> systems in use across the world.
>
> kimpanel is currently shipped as part of kdeplasma-addons. I think
> that's broken and it needs to be part of the core Plasma Desktop
> product - typing text in your language is a pretty basic thing.
>
> I'd like us to do the following in the near future (i.e. for 5.6):
>
> a) Move it from kdeplasma-addons to plasma-desktop. This adds
>    optional build dependencies on the libraries that kimpanel
>    supports as backends to plasma-desktop - ibus and fcitx. The
>    maintainer (Weng Xuetian aka csslayer on #plasma) is on board
>    with this.
>
> b) Improve it where necessary - let's all have a look at the code
>    with our Plasma hats on. It's not in bad shape though.
>
> c) Improve the desktop init js to auto-add kimpanel to the default
>    panel depending on locale. In prep for this we already exposed
>    the locale on the scripting interface in 5.4, but we don't use
>    it in the script yet. This means adding a whitelist of locales
>    to the script and maintaing it; I'd initially base it on the
>    list of locales Fedora uses to make the call on installing ibus
>    by default.
>
>
> Longer-term I want us to:
>
> d) Merge kimpanel and the keyboard layout indicator.
>
> e) Make it easier to add input languages (this is more than just
> a keyboard layout) from System Settings and auto-add kimpanel to
> the panel when needed: This is the level our proprietary competi-
> tion has been at for a long time, and we need to catch up.
>
> f) Investigate global emoji input via the IME stack.
>
>
> The overall goal here is to make sure basic keyboard usability
> is always-available to a wider audience than before and doesn't
> require a sysadmin degree to achieve. You shouldn't have to know
> that you need kdeplasma-addons or ibus to be able to set up and
> type in your lang. We fail this hard right now, let's do better!

Cool initiative! +1

Aleix