Part 6 - Let's type in Japanese

Now, we can view Japanese in terminal, let's try installing some input method framework. The CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT for Slackware64 14.2 suggests to use SCIM, but according to Arch wiki, SCIM is a dead project now. So, we'll try installing IBus.

Disclaimer:
The information in this site is the result of my researches in the Internet and of my experiences. This information below is solely used for my purpose and may not be suitable for others.

Installation:

Installation of ibus as well as its dependencies and Japanese engine, ibus-anthy, is no difficult tasks. If you are planning to input Japanese characters, you might consider installing ibus-qt as well. They are available from Slackbuilds.org as usual.

Configurations:

Once the installation is done, start the setup program to do some configurations.$ ibus-setup

All I changed was the keyboard shortcuts and input methods. For keyboard shortcuts, I was hoping Alt+Shift would just work but it didn't, so I changed it to Alt+Shift+space.

For input methods, I added Japanese - Anthy to enable Japanese input. You might have noticed that its icon is different from the default one. This is because I replaced its default icon with my own.

The configuration of ibus should be done now. You'll see a small EN icon in its systray. That confirms ibus is running now. Left click on the icon will show you the list available input methods, in this case, English and Japanese - Anthy.

.bashrc:

We need to tell the system that we are using ibus for alternate language inputs after logging out or shutdown. To do this, we update .bashrc and add some environment variables.$ nvim ~/.bashrc ----------------------------------------- ... export GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus export XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus export QT_IM_MODULE=ibus ...

i3/config:

Now, we need to start ibus each time we log into i3 window manager. To do this, we add ibus-autostart to at the end of i3's config file.$ nvim ~/.config/i3/config ----------------------------------------- ... exec --no-startup-id ibus-autostart

Japanese input is enabled and available for terminal as well.

Changing Default Anthy Icon:

I thought the default Anthy icon was not pretty and didn't like it. So, I decided to change it to my own. After searching for the icon in the system, I found it in /usr/share/ibus-anthy/icons/. It's called ibus-anthy.png. I used GIMP to create another icon and replaced it.

• Part 1 - Base System
• Part 2 - Getting Some Utilities Installed
• Part 3 - Oh, what's that Window Manager?
• Part 4 - De-Uglifying i3
• Part 5 - Show Me Japanese in my Terminal
• Part 6 - Let's type in Japanese

That's all!
-gibb