Moving kimpanel to plasma-desktop

[Weng Xuetian]

Hi, thanks for bringing up this topic.

As current maintainer of kimpanel and fcitx developer I'm always want
to make input method easier to use under plasma.

For me gnome's ibus integration is not always a step forward but
failure in some places. (Well this could be a long topic later) Though
at that time I have little influnence on them to complain about where
they got wrong from a Chinese user and input method develop POV.

I already had lots of idea for improving these for a long time but
never got my hand dirty on this, now maybe it's the right time to do
more :).

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 1:08 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!
>
>
>
> Cheers,
> Eike
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