Hojun-Cho
dadda19b3a
grabrepeat was an empty body, and under the grab the compositor feeds the client nothing while a key is down: one press, then only repeat_info, leaving the repeat to whoever holds the grab. So a key strans ate acted once however long it was held. Hold Backspace over a syllable and one jamo goes; hold a jamo key and you get one where every other window gives four a second. X11 has none of this -- the server auto-repeats and xim.c dispatches every press -- so the same keyboard behaved differently depending on which frontend the window went through. Under headless sway, which advertises repeat_info(25, 600), holding Backspace 1.5s over 라 with 가가가나다 committed behind it: before preedit 라 -> ㄹ, and no key at the client at all after preedit 라 -> ㄹ -> empty, then 9 BackSpace at the client fcitx5 and kime both keep driving the repeat after the engine stops wanting the key, and both then must send a release before every press, or the client sees a key held down and starts a repeat of its own on top of theirs. That machinery exists only to undo the choice that created it. strans does not need it: forward() already hands a key the engine did not take to the client as a key, and the client repeats that correctly -- the same hold with nothing pending, which takes that untouched path, delivers 24. So the rule is one sentence. strans repeats what the engine takes; when the engine stops taking it, presskey has already passed the key on, the deadline is dropped, and the client repeats it from there. 9 against 24 is that handover: driving every tick here would have made them one number. It costs one pause of the client's own delay, 600ms, where the preedit empties. It buys no release-and-press fiction anywhere in the file, no second repeat engine, and no timestamp arithmetic -- exactly one key is forwarded per hold, so there is no run of stale timestamps to mend. nsec() is gettimeofday, which steps; a deadline wants the clock ipc.c already uses. The owner poll stands down while a key repeats, because the repeat's own Keypress carries our owner and takes the engine back, so it would have nothing to find. Arming needs the engine and cannot be reached from the unit suite; ending a repeat can, and a repeat outliving its key is the worst this could do. wl/repeat-ends was checked by breaking it five ways -- a constant rate, a constant delay, the empty body back again, the key's own release no longer ending it, and a repeat into a dead context staying armed -- each failing only its own line. Phases A-G unchanged at both scales; 90 unit, check-live, check-stress and valgrind clean. One limit worth writing down: the GTK probe prints the BackSpace it receives and never deletes on one, on this path or on the plain pass-through, so the phase proves the keys arrive and says nothing about the text behind them. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
strans
strans is a small, single-user input method for Korean, Japanese, English,
emoji and symbols, with Vietnamese Telex as a compatibility mode. One
engine serves four frontends: zwp_input_method_v2 on Wayland — sway and
any other compositor that offers it — IBus, which GTK 4 and Qt use, XIM,
and a GTK 3 module.
Modes
| Key | Mode |
|---|---|
Ctrl+S |
Korean Hangul (2-beolsik) |
Ctrl+N |
Japanese Hiragana, converting to Kanji |
Ctrl+K |
Japanese Katakana |
Ctrl+T |
English |
Ctrl+V |
Vietnamese Telex |
Ctrl+E |
Emoji and symbol search |
Ctrl+H |
One-shot Hanja and symbol search |
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. The mode switched to — 한, あ, ア, ă,
A — shows in the popup until the next key. A Korean keyboard's 한/영 and
한자 keys stand for Ctrl+S/Ctrl+T and Ctrl+H; a Japanese one's
半角/全角, ひらがな/カタカナ, 変換 and 無変換 for the kana modes, Space
and English.
Composing
Japanese composes a whole reading and then offers its Kanji with none
chosen. Space and Tab step through the candidates and wrap (Shift
reverses), the reading in Katakana last, so a word the dictionary lacks
converts with one Space; Up/Down and PageUp/PageDown move without
wrapping. Enter commits the chosen candidate, or the reading, as 0 and
typing on always do. Once a candidate is chosen 1-9 take that row of
the page shown; before that the digits type. Backspace deletes the last
kana shown, and romaji that made no kana stays as typed until it is mended;
Esc cancels the reading, and on a chosen candidate both go back to it.
The dictionary keys verbs and adjectives by stem and okurigana, so kaku
offers かく's readings and then 書く and its kin — typing the okurigana
with Shift, as SKK does, kaKu, asks for that split first. Katakana
mode does not convert.
Korean composes one syllable at a time. Enter, Tab, Esc and any key
that is not a jamo commit the syllable and go on to the application, so
Esc still leaves insert mode. Two lone consonants join into the compound
final they make (rt → ㄳ), and a vowel typed before its consonant is
reordered under it (kr → 가), as in libhangul.
A search takes the keys until Enter, Space or 1-9 picks a result or
Esc cancels, then returns to the previous mode. Emoji matches the typed
keys, and what they spell in the current mode, against a prefix of every
emoji's CLDR name and keywords in English, Korean and Japanese, and against
ASCII aliases such as -> and <=. Ctrl+H takes the syllable being
composed as its query and composes on from it, converting a word as well as
a syllable — 한자 gives 漢字, 대한민국 gives 大韓民國 — and Esc gives the
syllable back. A lone consonant is a reading too, and answers with the
symbol table a Korean keyboard's 한자 key has always offered: ㅁ gives ※ ○
△ ㈜, ㄴ the brackets 「」『』, ㄹ the units ℃ ㎏ ℓ, ㅇ the circled numbers
①②③. Text already committed belongs to the application and cannot be
converted.
Dead keys and Compose sequences are composed by strans itself for the
Wayland, XIM and IBus frontends, from XCOMPOSEFILE or the locale; the
GTK 3 module leaves them to GtkIMContextSimple.
Preedit and candidates
| Frontend | Preedit | Candidates |
|---|---|---|
| Wayland input method | inline in the client | popup |
| GTK 3 and IBus | inline in the client | popup |
| XIM PreeditCallbacks | inline through XIM callbacks | popup |
| XIM PreeditPosition, PreeditNothing | popup | popup |
On Wayland the popup is a surface the compositor places at the text cursor,
flipping it above the line when there is no room below. Elsewhere it is an
X11 window, placed from the XIM spot or from the GTK caret, and XIM text
travels as COMPOUND_TEXT. Either way GDK_SCALE sizes it for HiDPI
displays.
Build and test
git submodule update --init
make docker-image
make docker-build
That leaves strans, the daemon, and gtk/im-strans.so, the GTK 3 module.
Tests come in three tiers:
make check # generated-map validation and unit tests
make check-live # one IBus, GTK, XIM and IPC daemon smoke each
make check-stress # randomized, capacity, collision, failure and restart
make docker-check runs all three in the container, and
make docker-valgrind the unit suite under Valgrind; rerun
make docker-image after changing Dockerfile. UNITARGS=hangul filters
the unit suite alone, not the other tiers.
A native build wants a C toolchain, Make, pkg-config and Plan 9 port, plus
development files for D-Bus, XCB and xcb-imdkit, Wayland and
wayland-scanner, xkbcommon, Pango and Cairo, and GTK 3; the tests also
want Xvfb, Python 3 and fonts covering Latin, CJK and emoji.
Dockerfile names the exact packages.
Run
./run.sh # restart the daemon in the background
./strans map # or run it in the foreground
./strans DIR reads hira.map, kata.map, telex.map, kanji.dict,
emoji.dict and hanja.dict from DIR at runtime; nothing but the GTK
module is installed. A service supervisor wants the session's
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and its WAYLAND_DISPLAY or DISPLAY: the GTK module
finds the daemon at $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/strans.sock, else
/tmp/strans.UID, and IBus clients through the address file libibus
expects under ~/.config/ibus/bus/, which strans writes as ibus-daemon
would.
strans shows one popup per session, so it picks a frontend at startup: a
compositor offering zwp_input_method_v2 gets the Wayland frontend, and
then neither XIM nor the X11 popup runs; every other session gets XIM. The
IBus endpoint and the GTK 3 module are served in both.
On Wayland, then, set none of the variables below. GTK, Qt and Firefox
speak text-input-v3 themselves — GTK 4 binds it with GTK_IM_MODULE unset
— and setting these is what pushes them off the path that works: such a
client still composes inline but shows no candidates, because the popup
belongs to the Wayland frontend. Chromium is beyond help either way, since
it asks for text-input-v1, which wlroots does not implement.
export XMODIFIERS=@im=strans # XIM
doas make -C gtk install # GTK 3 module
export GTK_IM_MODULE=strans
GLFW_IM_MODULE=ibus kitty # IBus client example
strans provides its own IBus endpoint, so ibus-daemon and fcitx are not
needed. Building the GTK module wants GTK development files; installing
one built elsewhere does not. The install target takes GTK_MODULE_DIR
when set, else asks GTK where its modules live; doas make -C gtk uninstall
removes it. With neither WAYLAND_DISPLAY nor DISPLAY the daemon still
serves IBus and its socket, but nothing draws a popup.
Dictionary data
After changing an input source, regenerate and verify:
python3 map/mktelex.py >map/telex.map
map/mkemoji >map/emoji.dict
map/mkhanja >map/hanja.dict
make verify-map
map/README says where the emoji, Hanja and Japanese data
comes from.
Benchmark
make bench builds bench/bench. With the daemon stopped, ./bench.sh
starts one, warms it up and records the workload with Linux perf into
bench/perf.data.
Licensing
Third-party notices are in LICENSES. The repository declares
no license for the strans source as a whole.