Re: Unicode character entry

[Joe Smith <jes martnet com>]

Joe Smith <jes <at> martnet.com> writes:

> 
> For the past few years using Gnome on Fedora, I have been able to enter 
> arbitrary Unicode characters in any Gnome/Gtk application using 
> Ctrl+Shift+U followed by the character's code point as hex digits.
> 
> I just upgraded to Fedora 13 which includes Gnome 2.30, and this handy 
> feature seems to have disappeared!
> ...
> Is there any way to get the old behavior?

I was given a method that restores the old behavior for Fedora 13; I
expect it will work in F12 also. See
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=598289

Remove the xim package:

$ sudo yum remove gtk2-immodule-xim

The script, /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/none.conf, checks whether the xim
package is installed and sets GTK_IM_MODULE=gtk-im-context-simple only
if xim is not installed.

Xim was installed with F13, in an en_US locale, and even though no input
method was configured and xim was not active, its presence on the system
prevented the gtk-im-context-simple module from being loaded.

Removing the xim package will change the default for all users on the
system. A particular user should still be able to configure the ibus
input methods, but xim will not be available.

I can still get characters using the compose key as well.

Creating/modifying ~/.{gnomerc,xinputrc,gtkrc,xinit} did not work for
me, but I can't say for sure that I correctly spake the necessary
incantations ;-)

I still don't know if there is any general policy regarding the default
input method for Gnome/gtk+. In my experience, many users can benefit
from a single, standard, documented method for entering characters by
code point; I hope this will be clarified soon.