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

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.

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 supports UTF8_STRING and COMPOUND_TEXT. Position clients place the popup from XNSpotLocation; otherwise XIM placement falls back to the bottom of the focus or client window.

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

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 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

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. run.sh restarts the existing strans process 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 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.

Licensing

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