XIM

XIM (= X Input Method) is a generic API to build applictions which have support for international input.

All applications which have support for the XIM-protocol build in, can be used to input Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

Many X11 applications already support XIM, for example:

• most KDE 2 and most Gnome applications
• Browsers like Mozilla, Netscape, Konqueror
• Editors like Emacs, XEmacs, gvim
• terminals like mlterm, kterm, and rxvt
• Java applications

To use XIM, a XIM server program must be running (and sometimes a conversion backend as well). Table 1 shows the XIM servers which currently work on SuSE Linux.

Note: ATOK X and WXG are not free software and are not distributed with SuSE Linux. For more information on ATOK X see section 6.1.5, for more information on WXG see section 6.2.3.

The default key-sequence to switch between English and non-English mode listed in table 1 can usually be changed. Please refer to the section of the respective XIM server to find out how to change the default key-sequence.

LC_CTYPE is an environment variable which indicates how characters should be handled. If LC_CTYPE is unset, it inherits its value from LANG or LC_ALL. XMODIFIERS is an environment variable indicating which XIM server to talk to.

It is possible to run several XIM servers at the same time and select with LC_CTYPE and XMODIFIERS the XIM server one wants to use for an application. For example if kinput2, nicolatter, and ami are concurrently running, one can start a mlterm with Japanese input via kinput2 enabled with

 ~$ LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 XMODIFIERS="@im=kinput2" mlterm 

a mlterm with Japanese input via nicolatter enabled with

 ~$ LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 XMODIFIERS="@im=nicolatter" mlterm 

and a mlterm with Korean input via ami enabled with

 ~$ LC_CTYPE=ko_KR.UTF-8 XMODIFIERS="@im=Ami" mlterm 

These may all run concurrently.

Subsections

• Applications using Athena widgets and XIM
• Automatic starting of an XIM server with the X11 session
  • Customizing XIM server startup
  
  
• kinput2
  • kinput2 and Canna
    • Simple input example
    • More advanced input example
    • popup the kinput2-Canna menu
    • input via hex code
    • input via radical
    • adding/deleting words to/from a Canna dictionary
    • input of special symbols
    • input of hankaku katakana and zenkaku romaji
  • kinput2 and Wnn
    • kinput2 and Wnn with ccdef.kinput2.egg key bindings
    • kinput2 and Wnn with ccdef.kinput2 key bindings
  
  
• nicolatter
  • Usage of nicolatter
  • Remarks about nicolatter and Canna
  
  
• ATOK X
• Ami
• xcin
• SCIM