D12069: Implement a keyboard selector plasmoid

[Eike Hein]

hein added a comment.


  In D12069#243315 <https://phabricator.kde.org/D12069#243315>, @davidedmundson wrote:
  
  > Is that something that can happen now?
  
  
  We have a GSoC project in the Ideas list this year that's aimed at it, and there are other Linux desktops that prove it's possible (e.g. Gnome has this).
  
  The goal is to evolve the keyboard settings in System Settings towards managing input languages, the way it's done in the products of most of our competitors (both free and proprietary). The general workflow is to add an input language, then select the keyboard layout for it. This is incidentally exactly how the config UI for something like ibus/fcitx works. In Plasma, currently you need to reach this via the panel widget. Via the GSoC project, we want to bring it to System Settings instead. kimpanel can then run kcmshell. Life will be good.
  
  Since not all systems have an IM daemon running (although increasingly Linux systems run one by default, e.g. Gnome does for globally available emoji input), the KCM will need to have modes where it either backchannels to the IM daemon for configuration or uses xkb as before. On Wayland the situation is a little bit different since the compositor is always in charge of the layout, so it will need to talk both to KWin and the IM daemon. The details of this are still up on the air: That's why it's a multi-month project.
  
  Just like the KCM will fall back to xkb on IM daemon-less systems, it makes sense to pursue this architecture as far as the panel indicators are concerned. It's long been known that the redundancy/conflict between kimpanel and the keyboard layout indicator will eventually need to be resolved/collapsed. The problems we're having:
  
  - We have support for automagically adding the keyboard layout indicator when needed, but we lack this for kimpanel. We currently add kimpanel to the default panel on first logon based on a locale white list. But if you do first logon on an English-language system and later add, say, Chinese input (which in lieu of the GSoC project you currently need to do painfully in a manual sysadmin fashion), you need to manually add the widget. It's a TODO to make this automatic.
  
  - When an IM daemon is in use, the keyboard layout indicator currently becomes useless on X11 (because the IM daemon takes over keyboard layout management). But when the IM daemon goes away, it becomes useful again. Currently the user needs to do lots of manual steps to switch between them. Add/remove/hide one or the other, etc.
  
  It therefore IMHO makes sense to put the layout indicator into kimpanel as a fallback codepath (and on Wayland we'd currently always use this fallback until we figure out IM there properly). If the reaction to this is "eww, I don't understand kimpanel and I don't want to touch it", then that's exactly the problem: We need more core devs to review and improve kimpanel and integrate it properly into the core offering. It does things we need (our users rely on it), but it's currently developed largely in isolation and poorly integrated. That this is one of the few areas where we still ship two redundant/overlapping UI solutions is telling.

REPOSITORY
  R120 Plasma Workspace

REVISION DETAIL
  https://phabricator.kde.org/D12069

To: apol, #plasma
Cc: hein, graesslin, broulik, davidedmundson, plasma-devel, ragreen, Pitel, ZrenBot, lesliezhai, ali-mohamed, jensreuterberg, abetts, sebas, apol, mart
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