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
Ctrl+P	Toggle popup preedit

Use Up/Down to move through candidates, Enter or 1-9 to select, Tab to cycle temporary search results, and Esc to cancel. 0 commits the current reading without conversion.

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. Hanja lookup currently supports one modern Hangul syllable at a time.

Build and test

Docker is the supported build environment:

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

Build output:

strans              daemon and IBus frontend
xim/strans-xim      XIM frontend
gtk/im-strans.so    GTK 3 frontend

Use make docker-check TESTARGS=hangul to run selected C tests. Native make all, make check, and make bench are also available when the dependencies listed in Dockerfile are installed.

Run

The popup needs one to four font files. No fonts are bundled. Each file is validated and registered with Pango as an application font. Pango shapes the complete string and chooses glyph fallback from those fonts and the normal system fonts; command-line file order is not an exact per-glyph fallback contract.

run.sh uses installed Noto Color Emoji, DejaVu, Jigmo, or Noto CJK fonts when available, or accepts explicit files. Supply a color emoji font such as Noto Color Emoji to render emoji in color:

./run.sh
./run.sh /path/to/primary.ttf /path/to/fallback.ttc

The popup renderer requires Pango/PangoCairo 1.56 or newer and Cairo 1.18 or newer.

The script starts the daemon and, when DISPLAY is set, the XIM frontend. It restarts any existing strans processes owned by the current user.

Configure clients as needed:

# XIM
export XMODIFIERS=@im=strans

# GTK 3 module
doas make -C gtk install

# IBus client example
GLFW_IM_MODULE=ibus kitty

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

Licensing

Data and third-party notices are in docs/PROVENANCE.md and font/PROVENANCE. The repository does not currently declare a license for the strans source as a whole.