Unified, preloaded input method for languages other than English

[jt15s]

A Japanese YouTuber made the following review on Beta3: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKovQGanMlo In the review, he laments that he cannot input Japanese text. Upon further investigation, I found that a Japanese IME is available in HaikuDepot but not bundled with Haiku. Additionally, it doesn't seem like there is clear documentation on enabling input in Japanese either - the reviewer had no idea there was an IME in HaikuDepot.

What makes things more complicated is that other languages usually use their own IMEs, for example KeyMap Switcher for Cyrllic languages.

Thus, it is strongly recommended to create a unified, preloaded input method for all languages - PulkoMandy mentioned that there has been talk of this but nothing has ever come to fruition. This would greatly improve the experience of users who use languages other than English.

Thanks in advance!

[waddlesplash]

We definitely are not going to make our own IMEs for every language. KeymapSwitcher is already included in release images (and there is a ticket about integrating it into the input server).

Instead we should open individual tickets for whatever IMEs we should bundle by default, or add guides as appropriate. mt, who does the Japanese translations, published such a guide for Japanese here: ​https://mtzatulog.blogspot.com/2021/06/haiku-r1-beta3-using-japanese-in-haiku.html

[waddlesplash]

Appears we already have a ticket for this.

[pulkomandy]

We definitely are not going to make our own IMEs for every language.

Why not? "being able to use your keyboard" seems like one of the basic features I expect from an operating system. This should not need a guide. And this should be integrated in the OS (settings in input preferences, unified way to use the input methods with similar shortcuts, etc).

It is not possible to achieve this by letting individual people figure it out.

[X512]

Appears we already have a ticket for this.

Why duplicate? Input methods exists not only for CJK.

[waddlesplash]

Why not? "being able to use your keyboard" seems like one of the basic features I expect from an operating system.

Yes, but there is just no way we are personally going to be able to write IMEs. The current Japanese IME for instance is actually a port (with a native UI, but a port nonetheless) because it turned out that writing one just for Haiku was unfeasible, it appears.

Like I said, we should bundle IMEs as appropriate, activate by default, etc. I am certainly not saying we should leave this to individual users; I quite literally just did mean that the Haiku development team personally cannot reasonably be responsible for the maintenance for IMEs for all languages on the planet. (For that matter, we don't exactly maintain all the keymaps in-tree either, but rely on the users of said keymaps to keep them up to date as appropriate.)

[pulkomandy]

If we want to have them nicely integrated with the OS (Input preferences and all), we will need to do some work on the Haiku side as well.

Of course we won't be rewriting everything, but we should integrate these things properly, and it can't be done by just bundling things, we need some work on our side too.

The good news is that we're an opensource project and people can contribute their work (or we can integrate it).