[TITLE] [DATE] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [SETTITLE]Janky IME [SETDATE]6-29-2023 UPDATE: This IME is now tmux based, old xdotool version is still here UPDATE2: I have created the most cursed thing in existance. Full unicode display and input support in the linux console using only userland bash/busybox and tmux. See we have unicode at home A new python version came out, so of course that means every python package on my rolling-release system has broken. This includes ibus, which I need for my input method. I'm currently running some web-crawling scripts that I don't want to stop, so while I wait for my machine to finish downloading all of PDB, I decided to write a janky bashscript implementation of ibus table so that I can still use 嘸蝦米. Background: 嘸蝦米 (EN: Boshiamy) is a proprietary component-based input method for Chinese. They offer paid software on iOS, Android, and Windows, but no Linux version is available. On my phone I gladly pay for a Boshiamy license, but on Linux I use this implementation of Boshiamy using ibus table from here. However, I urge that people pay for the license anyways as most of the actual work in creating an IME is organizational. The technical aspects of IMEs are fairly trivial as you'll see here. In technical terms, it's just a very large TSV file with the first column being the input code, the 2nd being the character, and the 3rd being a ranking for ordering which character comes first when selecting them. EX: typing wso[SPACE] or wso1 inputs 浩, typing wso2 inputs 澢 wso 浩 100 wso 澢 99 It can also be used for non-chinese characters such as è ,ne è 100 The Implementation: I want this to work in the terminal, and I want it to only require bash, and tmux, and it needs to work on all programs running in the terminal regardless of whether they use cooked input(bash) or raw input(vim). So what I ended up on is a bash script that runs in a seperate tmux panel and sends input to the previously active panel Input is read with read in a loop CODE: OIFS=$IFS export IFS=""; read -rsn1 i IFS=$OIFS IFS="" is done to make it read spaces as input, but this makes this implementation very brittle and probably not portable depending on bash versions. This also passes along control and special characters such as delete and move left, and it seems tmux handles most of the differences between terminals. An older version of this ime using xdotool did not handle these control characters well. I then simply run grep ^$code\s, rearrange the columns with awk and sort, then take out the ranking column CODE: opt=$(grep "^$code\s" ~/lang/zh/boshiamy/ibus-boshiamy/boshiamy.txt |\ #remove simplfied grep -v 98|\ awk '{print $3" "$2}' |\ sort -nr|\ awk '{print $2}') finally, it inputs the selected character into tmux if the ime input is 1-9 or Space. NOTE: bash variables don't store newlines, so the conversion of the input characters from line seperated to space seperated was done for free. However this makes the code less portable CODE: char=$(echo $opt | awk "{print \$1}") ... tmux send-key -t "!" "$char" Downsides/The Future: This works in the linux console but obviously the linux console has limitations on what text it can display(by default the linux console can not display fonts with more than 512 characters). I think I'm gonna write a bash based cbrll implemntation and a character displayer as well so that I can get full userland unicode display and input support.