Interest in Wayland/IME support

A while back I made a patch that supports IME on Linux’s Wayland back-end.

I found this difficult to test because I’ve never used IME before and am guessing at the behavior users might want. The patch worked on a basic level (the IME input box opened at the text-cursor location for e.g.) but it needs further development since there were some glitches (from memory).

I’m curious if anyone is using IME on Wayland or interested in this functionality.

The patch can be found here: D17030.


Follow up that this has now been committed to main (for 4.1 release), see: GHOST/Wayland: IME support using the text-input protocol · a38a49b073 - blender - Blender Projects

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Input Method Editor?

I think think it needs some clarification for the sake of disambiguation…

If Input Method Editor is meant, I do use Wayland but I’ve yet to run into needing it(since my native language is Latin script), which is not to say that I couldn’t in the future for some niche situation(such as inserting a ‘tm’ or copyright sign into some text or such perhaps). I’m sure Japanese and Chinese or Korean users of blender for an example would appreciate it, but I’m not sure how many of them are Linux users.

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Yes, this is just for non-Latin text entry. But it is used for more languages that you might guess. An IME can bring up a visible box that helps entry (like Chinese or Japanese), but others use the same system without always opening a popup (like Korean). There are many languages that use the system just to swap characters, so typing the regular ABC keys enters their alphabet instead usually with variations based on the context (a character might differ depending on the one before it).

Millions. But this type of coding is ideally done by someone with skin in the game. So best if we found a volunteer Chinese-speaking dev who uses Linux who can take what Campbell has started and run with it. There are lots of weird corner cases that are difficult to anticipate for people who don’t use the language.

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Follow up, initial IME support has been added although needs more testing.
Dead keys & compose key is now supported too.

GHOST/Wayland: IME support using the text-input protocol.

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