IBus UI review

[Matthias Clasen]

On Wed, 2009-02-18 at 11:38 +0800, Huang Peng wrote:


>  >
>  > - The toolbar seems useless if "focus-follows-mouse" is turned on, since
>  > it becomes inactive on focus out. This also affects the status icon.
> 
> It is useful for some input methods. Some IMs need it to show current IM 
> status, and user can use it to change the IME's status and behaviours. 
> BTW, ibus has a setting for it. User could hide it when the input method 
> is not active. Maybe adding a configure item to always hide the bar is 
> better.

Did you understand what I said about focus-follows-mouse ? Anyway,
another way in which the toolbar is problematic is caused by the odd way
in which input methods are started before the rest of the session. The
toolbar appears way before other parts of the desktop, and hangs there,
naked, in front of the background. Can we keep it hidden until the
status icon has been embedded in the panel, please ?

>  >
>  > - Alternatively, if we can't get rid of im-chooser by default, maybe
>  > ibus-setup should not have its own menu item (I notice that scim-setup
>  > doesn't have one either), since it is available via im-chooser.
> 
> SCIM has one, named 'SCIM Input Method Setup'.

Yes, but that does not show up in the menus. afaics. 

Another case of 'menu pollution' that I only spotted after doing the
review is that IBus puts another menu item at Applications ->
Accessories -> IBus. That is not good, imo. First of all, the menu label
does not explain at all what it does, and second, it just duplicates the
functionality for starting an im framework that is already present with
im-chooser. Such duplication is just confusing, please drop it.

>  > Preferences, General tab
>  >
>  > - "Auto start IBus on session login" is very techno babble. Can we make
>  > that something like "Enable Input Methods" ? I don't think there is any
>  > need to talk about sessions and autostart here.
> 
> How about "Start ibus on login"?

First of all, does this not just duplicate functionality of im-chooser
again ? (Of course, I would love to get rid of im-chooser, so in that
case it won't duplicate it anymore...) 

But also, I don't think this should be only about starting at login. It
would be better to let the checkbox start and stop ibus in general. Of
course, at login time, you will also use the last value of that
preference to decide if ibus should be started or not.

> 
> What's the keybinding capplet? Is it the 'Keyboard Shortcuts' in 
> Preferences->Pernson menu? I tested some keyboard shortcuts, they do no 
> work. I use compiz as my windows manager. Is it the reason?

The window manager should only have an influence on the window
management keybindings (but then, the tool is smart enough to show the
right keybindings, depending on which window manager is running, I
believe.

Anyway, the keybinding capplet is really just a uniform way to set gconf
keys that represent keybindings. Actually grabbing the keys and doing
something still needs to be done by the applications that use the
keybindings.