Tux Machines

New ideas using Wayland Input Methods

Posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Aug 03, 2023

Input Methods are a way of allowing third parties programs to manipulate text in text input boxes in applications.

The two traditional uses of this are on-screen keyboards like one has on a mobile phone, and Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) input where a keyboard doesn't map directly to the text we want to see on screen.

It's a lot more than merely injecting keys; the input method needs to have an awareness of the text cursor and the ability to manipulate whole words and sentences at a time. This is extremely important for the CJK way of typing where multiple keyboard keys are used to compose a single character. It's also important for virtual keyboards that have advanced features like auto-completion and spell-checking words.

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