SCIM Setup -> Frontend -> Global Setup -> Share the same input method among all applications scim's default settings for a new user should set this enabled by default.
However this has some consequences - like IM is activated for new apps at startup i think - perhaps there is a config option to change that though?
> IM is activated for new apps at startup Is this always a bad thing?
Often at least - but maybe something can be done about it. Certainly for many apps it is quite annoying.
What is this behavior by default in Windows?
In Windows I believe the default is native language input. But people have told me they want ascii input by default.
*** Bug 170481 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment #5: depends. ascii input is still default for notepad say. IME may be controlled under the Office suite.
Hmm, it does make sense that the application decides whether it should be enabled or disabled by default. If you are using notepad for example, you are more likely to be editing an ASCII file than in a word processor application. I plan on doing more testing of SCIM's default behavior and to compare it to other operating systems.
I missed Comment #1 and have an idea for that. Actually scim-anthy supports such things and you can always enable IM at the startup time with it - of course could be with ascii mode but anyway. steps are 1. turn on "Share the same input method among all applications" check box in FrontEnd -> Global Setup 2. change Input mode to Latin to be ascii mode for default or to Hiragana in Common tab in IMEngine -> Anthy. 3. it may be good for Windows user to change the keybinding theme to MS-IME-like at Key bindings theme in Key bindings tab in IMEngine -> Anthy. What benefit there are are you can (de)activate IME with what you could do on Windows. I mean Kanji key just works for that. We need much more feedbacks if we would change the default keybindings. the survery result wasn't sufficient to do it. it would rather keeps current one. FYI
None of the other IMEs currently seem to support setting English as the default input mode currently, though I suppose it would not be so hard to add such a feature to each one. Also I agree ideally the default mode should depend on the application, though currently there is no way for a gtk immodule to give that information. scim-hangul and scim-m17n don't have an English input mode yet either.
In response to the comment "more feedbacks if we would change the default keybindings. the survery result wasn't sufficient to do it". This is exactly why I opposed the idea of this survey. The kind of survey we conducted was problematic because it is self-selecting. We had only a tiny population of users taking the survey, and the results from that group are no representative of our target market. It is plainly obvious that changing the default keybinding for activation is critical for the Japanese user. I would assert that any thoughts to the contrary are insular engineer thinking. Engineers are not exposed to regular users, and the software that regular users know. If we want to have any chance of winning those users, we must make our software behave exactly as they expect without the need for documentation or training. About the other topics in this bug, I wish to think more before responding.
The main issues I see: 1. Do we need the main scim on/off toggle (Ctrl-Space)? (Currently, yes, since some IMEs don't have an ascii mode yet.) 2. For global IC mode, should scim default to being on (current) or off by default (probably off for now, until all our IMEs have ascii mode). 3. Global IC mode needs exposure out in the wild, since the code seems to be less tested (read "more buggy UI-wise") than Local IC mode.
Turning on Shared Input Mode by default in scim-1.4.4-6.
Default reverted in 1.4.4-8 since Shared Mode is too intrusive (actually it was not enabled in -6 yet due to an unapplied patch). Until all IMEs have their own input modes, defaulting to Shared Mode seems impractical. (Japanese users can use Shared Mode comfortably with scim-anthy's default mode set to ASCII ("_A").) My thinking now is that the current default actually provides a better UI for users in general.