strans

strans is a small, single-user input method for Korean, Japanese, English, emoji, and symbols. It provides one engine for IBus, XIM, and GTK 3. Vietnamese Telex is also available as a compatibility mode.

Input modes

Key	Mode
Ctrl+N	Japanese Hiragana and Kanji conversion
Ctrl+K	Japanese Katakana
Ctrl+S	Korean Hangul (2-beolsik)
Ctrl+T	English
Ctrl+V	Vietnamese Telex
Ctrl+E	Emoji and symbol search
Ctrl+H	One-shot Hanja search

A Korean keyboard's 한/영 key toggles Korean and English, and its 한자 key is Ctrl+H; a Japanese keyboard's 半角/全角 toggles Japanese and English, ひらがな/カタカナ switches between the two kana modes, 変換 turns Japanese on and then converts like Space, and 無変換 turns it off. Only a plain Ctrl chord is a strans key: with Shift, Alt, or Super held it commits what is pending and goes to the application, so Ctrl+Shift+V still pastes.

A complete Japanese reading shows its Kanji candidates with none chosen. Space chooses the first and then steps on, wrapping (Shift+Space steps back); Up/Down and PageUp/PageDown move without wrapping. An unmodified 1-9 commits that row of the current page. Enter and Tab commit the chosen candidate, or the reading when none is chosen, as 0 always does; so does typing on, or any key that ends the composition. Japanese consumes the confirming key; Korean and Vietnamese pass it on to the application. Space adds the reading in Katakana as the last candidate, so a word the dictionary lacks converts to Katakana with one Space. Backspace and Esc on a chosen candidate go back to the reading. In a temporary Emoji or Hanja search, Enter or Space commits the highlighted result and Tab/Shift-Tab wrap through the results. Leaving the field or clicking elsewhere commits what is pending. Esc cancels a Japanese reading or a search; in Korean and Vietnamese it commits the syllable and goes on to the application, so it still leaves insert mode.

Hiragana mode composes a complete reading before offering Kanji candidates. Katakana mode does not perform Kanji conversion. Emoji and Hanja searches return to the previous mode after use; switching language during a search commits the shown query; Esc in a Hanja search gives the syllable back to the composition. The Emoji search matches the typed keys, and what they spell in the current language, against a prefix of every emoji's CLDR name and keywords in English, Korean, and Japanese, and against ASCII symbol aliases such as -> and <=. Ctrl+H takes the syllable being composed as its query; the Hanja dictionary lists one modern Hangul syllable at a time.

Preedit and candidates

Frontend	Preedit	Candidates
GTK 3 and IBus	inline in the client	strans popup
XIM PreeditCallbacks	inline through XIM callbacks	strans popup
XIM PreeditPosition	strans popup	strans popup
XIM PreeditNothing	strans popup	strans popup

XIM text travels as COMPOUND_TEXT, which carries any UTF-8. A client that sends XNSpotLocation gets the popup at that spot whatever its preedit style; otherwise the popup sits under the focus window, or under the client window when no focus window is set.

The popup is an X11 window sized by GDK_SCALE on HiDPI displays, XIM is X11-only, and GTK popup placement converts the GTK caret to X11 root coordinates. There is no native Wayland popup surface or Wayland caret positioning. GTK and IBus clients can still use inline preedit where their display environment supports it.

Build and test

Initialize the bundled test library, then use the pinned Docker environment for a reproducible build:

git submodule update --init
make docker-image
make docker-build

Build output:

strans              daemon with IBus and XIM frontends
gtk/im-strans.so    GTK 3 frontend module

Tests have three tiers:

make check          # generated-map validation and focused unit tests
make check-live     # one IBus, GTK, XIM, and IPC daemon smoke
make check-stress   # randomized, capacity, collision, failure, and restart tests

UNITARGS filters only the focused C unit suite, for example make check UNITARGS=hangul. It does not select or skip live and stress tests. make docker-check rebuilds and runs all three tiers in the container, and make docker-valgrind runs the unit suite under Valgrind there; run make docker-image first after changing Dockerfile.

Native Linux source builds require a C toolchain, Make, pkg-config, Python 3, and cmp/diff, plus development files for:

• Plan 9 port (9c, 9l, libthread, and libbio);
• D-Bus development files;
• XCB, XCB RandR, XCB XKB, xcb-imdkit, xkbcommon, and xkbcommon-x11;
• Pango, PangoCairo, Cairo, and Fontconfig;
• GTK 3, plus libibus and Xlib for the live clients;
• Xvfb for the X11 live tests;
• a working C.UTF-8 locale and fonts covering Latin, CJK, and emoji.

The package names used by the canonical Arch Linux image are listed in Dockerfile.

Run

The popup uses the normal system fonts found by Pango and Fontconfig; no font file argument or system-wide strans installation is required. Run it directly from the build tree:

./run.sh
# equivalently
./strans map

run.sh stops every same-user process whose exact name is strans, starts one build-tree daemon in the background, and returns to the shell. It requires pkill from procps. Startup and frontend failures remain visible on the caller's standard error. A service supervisor should instead run ./strans map directly in the foreground.

The build does not copy or install the daemon or its data. ./strans DIR opens hira.map, kata.map, telex.map, kanji.dict, emoji.dict, and hanja.dict from DIR at runtime; run.sh passes the tracked map/ directory. Only the GTK subdirectory has install and uninstall targets.

Pango shapes the complete string and selects glyph fallback from the system font set.

The popup renderer uses Pango/PangoCairo and Cairo. When DISPLAY is set, strans starts its XIM worker in the same process.

Configure clients as needed:

# XIM
export XMODIFIERS=@im=strans

# GTK 3 module
doas make -C gtk install
export GTK_IM_MODULE=strans

# IBus client example
GLFW_IM_MODULE=ibus kitty

Building gtk/im-strans.so requires GTK development files. Installing an already-built, up-to-date module from this build tree does not: the install target first uses an explicit GTK_MODULE_DIR, then GTK's pkg-config variables, and finally the module directory reported by the GTK runtime's gtk-query-immodules-3.0. Packagers and cross builds should set GTK_MODULE_DIR explicitly. A prebuilt module must still match the target architecture and library ABI.

DESTDIR staging is supported and deliberately skips the host module-cache update. A native install needs the GTK runtime query utility so it can refresh that cache. Remove a native installation with:

doas make -C gtk uninstall

strans provides its own IBus endpoint; ibus-daemon and fcitx are not required. Without DISPLAY, the daemon and IBus frontend still work, but XIM is not started and the popup is disabled.

Dictionary data

After changing an input source, regenerate and verify the dictionaries:

map/mkemoji >map/emoji.dict
map/mkhanja >map/hanja.dict
make verify-map

See map/README for Hanja import and Japanese dictionary generation.

Benchmark

make bench builds bench/bench. With the daemon stopped, ./bench.sh starts one build-tree instance, warms it up, and records the workload with Linux perf. It requires perf and permission to profile the daemon, and writes bench/perf.data.

Licensing

Third-party license notices are in LICENSES. The repository does not currently declare a license for the strans source as a whole.