IMSettings: Delivery framework for general Input Method configuration

IMSettings is a framework that delivers Input Method settings and applies the changes so they take effect immediately without any need to restart applications or the desktop.

News

• [July 3, 2008] imsettings-0.101-3 has been released. (more details)
• [June 17, 2008] imsettings-0.101.2 has been released. (more details)
• [June 12, 2008] imsettings-0.101.1 has been released. (more details)
• [June 11, 2008] imsettings-0.101.0 has been released. (more details)
• [June 4, 2008] imsettings-0.100.0 has been released. (more details)

Background

Input Method is used to input some dozens of characters that can't be represented with ASCII characters, with some framework, such as XIM and SCIM via GTK+/Qt immodule. particularly which to handle languages that is a bit complex to do the same thing with the keyboard layout such as XKB. In the past, those frameworks has been applied through the environment variables, such as XMODIFIERS and GTK_IM_MODULE. and can't be influenced immediately and can't be without restarting the desktop because of its nature - it's being inherited from the parent process unless it's being brought up with the obvious thing from the terminal say. Also, there are no such framework to bring up the necessary process at the runtime - of course anyone could runs it manually though, it's totally out of focus on this project.

Features

• Provide the information of Input Method through IMSettings
• Provide the DBus service to start/stop process of Input Method
• Provide the way to apply Input Method to applications immediately

Scope

IMSettings may helps when:

• you may want to disable Input Method entirely to use features on any applications, which actually can't use with Input Method because of the key conflicting.
• you may try another Input Method without closing current desktop session.
• someone may wants to borrow your desktop temporarily, which uses different Input Method.
• the appropriate Input Methods needs to be installed by default regardless of you use, such as Live image.

Supported Toolkits

• GTK+ (with GConf backend)
• Xfce (with GConf backend and a plugin for xfce-mcs-manager)
• X (with IMSettings XIM server)