IBus

IBus (Intelligent Input Bus) is an open source input framework for Linux and Unix.

Installation

USE flags

Emerge

As well as the basic IBus framework, one or more engines should be installed. For example:

Have a look at the eix output for more available engines:

For graphical toolkit integration, app-i18n/ibus offers gtk2, gtk3 and gtk4 flags.

KDE

For IBus to work with Qt 5 / KDE 5 / Plasma, the ibus USE flag needs to be set on at least dev-qt/qtgui and kde-plasma/plasma-desktop :

dev-qt/qtguiibus
kde-plasma/plasma-desktopibus

And those packages rebuilt to reflect that change:

Configuration

The app-i18n/im-chooser package can be helpful for selecting the preferred input method.

If nothing starts (no ibus daemon) when a user logs in, add the following environment variables and log out:

exportXMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
exportGTK_IM_MODULE=ibus
exportQT_IM_MODULE=ibus
# Use `xim` in case some Electron apps (like Chromium) refuse to work with IBus
# export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
# export QT_IM_MODULE=xim
ibus-daemon-drx

The installation can be finely tuned by running:

ibus-setup can be used to set the preferred input methods, the system keyboard, or to add an icon in the taskbar.

The command-line ibus utility may also be used, in place of ibus-setup:

To inform Qt ibus is now the input method, run:

Plasma

On Plasma, the daemon should be started with ibus-daemon -dr --panel=/usr/libexec/kimpanel-ibus-panel instead.

This line should be placed in a login script, not a pre-startup script. See Knowledge Base:Configuring environment variables for more information.

See also

• How to read and write in Japanese — how to read and write in Japanese on a non-Japanese system.
• How_to_read_and_write_in_Chinese — how to read and write in Chinese on a non-Chinese system.
• Ibus-libpinyin — a Chinese input engine

• Localization