Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 188357
deadkeys don't work with XIM
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:30 EST
Description of problem: I've had a number of input-related problems lately, apparently most of them related with the latest scim builds. Most of them appear to have already been fixed, but this one remains, and it's highly annoying. Running the latest builds of GNU Emacs and XEmacs locally, with the US International keyboard layout, everything works just fine. However, if I run vncviewer on this same box and connect it to the VNC server module loaded into the X process, I get the problem I'm going to describe. I haven't tried vino on the server, mainly because it doesn't handle well (or at all?) differences between the keyboard maps of the server and the client, which Xvnc does. The machine I normally connect to has a br-abnt2 keyboard, but I believe that's irrelevant. It is probably worth pointing out that I had to downgrade to xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.0.1-9 in order for Xvnc to work, but that's a separate bug. Anyhow, the problem is that using dead-keys followed by blanks produce different effects depending on whether *emacs gets the input from the local keyboard or from vnc. When getting input from the local keyboard, on both machines, both GNU Emacs and XEmacs correctly take the sequence dead_diaeresis + space as a quotedbl, whereas over vnc they both behave differently. XEmacs interprets the same sequence as diaeresis, a behavior I'd observed many months ago, that could be worked around by setting LANG=en_US instead of en_US.UTF-8, but that apparently went away by itself; I had a bug report on that, but I don't have the bug number handy. GNU Emacs interprets the same sequence as an error, and just emit a blank. This behavior is new to me, although I haven't used GNU Emacs regularly in the recent past. GTK applications always generate " for the same sequence. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): emacs-21.4-14 xemacs-21.4.19-4 scim-1.4.4-13 xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.0.1-9 vnc-server-4.1.1-36 How reproducible: Every time Steps to Reproduce: 1.Set up a server box with br-abnt2 or us-intl keyboard and Xvnc loaded into the X server 2.Test that dead_diaeresis followed by blank generate quotedbl in GNU Emacs and XEmacs locally 3.Connect another box to it over VNC 4.Test the same key sequence on both Actual results: 2 works, 4 does not. Expected results: As of one week ago or so, it worked the same on both. Additional info:
I failed to mention that the stream of events, as reported by xev, is essentially identical in both cases. The only significant difference is that of the key codes, but the interpreted keysyms are the same.
It actually gets worse. In gtk apps such as gnome-terminal, with the us-intl keyboard configuration, dead keys on the local keyboard followed by blank produce no input whatsoever.
Any better with scim-1.4.4-14?
The problem in comment #2 appears to be fixed, but the main bug is still present. GNU Emacs and XEmacs are still unusable in configurations that have dead keys, except now it's in both local and connections and over vnc. dead_diaeresis followed by blank produces a blank in GNU Emacs and a diaeresis in XEmacs, where it used to, and still should, produce quotedbl on both, just like it does on GTK apps, and doubling the dead keys, that used to produce the non-dead corresponding accents, now is taken as a (possibly infinite) stream of dead-key events, also unlike GTK apps, that produce the actual accents.
Could you try uninstalling scim and see if that makes a difference? I don't think there have been any major changes related to this in the scim package recently. BTW most Asian users prefer to turn off XIM in Emacs and XEmacs fwiw.
unset XMODIFIERS before starting Emacs or XEmacs makes them both functional, so I'm pretty sure rpm -e scim would fix it until I next run my script that installs everything that's available in rawhide :-) I know the regression became apparent recently, but it might be related with the fact that scim was completely disabled before.
BTW this is most likely a limitation of Xlib XIM.
Now, I'm confused - deadkeys seem to be working ok for me with XIM in Emacs (on my fc5 box with scim from FC devel).
Alexandre: Can you confirm if FC devel's scim fix this problem?
I'm afraid I can't. My wife rebooted her rawhide-tracking box the other day, and now scim is getting in the way of proper functioning of dead keys on both GNU Emacs and XEmacs, even though scim says it's disabled for the English keyboard layout :-(
Thanks for reporting that: seems it was caused by excluding the English/European keyboard engine by default. Defaults should be fixed in scim-1.4.4-30.fc6, but existing users may have to add enable it by hand in scim-setup.
Closing. Please re-open if there are still problems.
It seems to be good now. I changed my .profile to re-enable scim a few days ago and forgot to report back since everything worked just fine :-) Thanks!