Holizz versus the Web

やった！

There were some things in Debian that seemed near-impossible but just work in Gentoo. One of those things are IMEs.

An Input Method Editor is how one types something that a keyboard doesn’t have enough keys for (like Japanese). It lets me type densha<SPC><RET>otoko<SPC><RET> and have 電車男 appear.

I spent hours and hours working on it in Debian and all it took in Gentoo was emerge scim-uim canna-cannadic scim-canna im-canna (don’t forget to /etc/init.d/canna start && rc-update add canna default). And then a few lines in my .xinitrc:

export LC_ALL="en_GB.UTF-8"
export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
export QT_IM_MODULE=scim
export XMODIFIERS="@im=SCIM"
scim -d

You may need to add some USE flags and update some packages, but if you’re interested in typing Japanese, you probably already had cjk canna unicode in there anyway.

Now I can switch between Dvorak and 日本語 by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Up (or Down).