Hardy: SCIM support is easily triggered making system unusable

[socceroos]

When typing text with Hardy Heron (all updates as at 7th March 2008 11:23am AEST) the text changes from english to 'Amharic' suddenly.

The key combination I've noticed is this, when pressing SHIFT+SPACEBAR it changes the text to 'Amharic'. This makes typing a bold phrase rather painful when holding down the shift key (the spaces in between the words are what triggers it).

example 1: HARDY HERON (without SHIFT+SPACEBAR)

example 2: HARDYሔርኦኝ (with SHIFT+SPACEBAR)

[Peter Anselmo (peter-anselmo)]

I also have experienced the exact same thing.

[Fabián Rodríguez (magicfab)]

It seems SCIM is enabled by default. It took me a few minutes realizing what was going on and I lost some work.

This effectively makes the computer unusable and will lead to data loss for people using any alternate keyboard layouts where typing timing may trigger the SCIM switching.

[Fabián Rodríguez (magicfab)]

Not sure about the package this should attributed too.

[Ming Hua (minghua)]

In bug #199030 Arne said that this is already fixed. Which version of scim and scim-bridge-client-gtk are people using when they experience this bug?

[James Bostian (stoney57)]

I had this happen tonight in the middle of posting a thread on the Ubuntu forum(probably due to a keystroke combination I used). I have(had) a fully updated Hardy Alpha 6 install, System-Preferences-Keyboard had no effect when changing the default back to USA.
Pressed Ctrl+Alt+F1 and ran "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg", which also had no effect whatsoever in changing the keyboard layout to us(still typing amharic characters, terminal was useless because of this). I had to completely reinstall Hardy Alpha 6, since nothing I tried would change the keyboard layout from amharic to us.
The scim I'm using is whatever is installed by default with Hardy.

[James Bostian (stoney57)]

Maybe I overreacted a bit...here's a thread in the Ubuntu forums that helped explain what happened:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=716952

[Lex Ross (lross)]

No you didn't. It's the most annoying and confusing thing in Hardy 8.04 Alpha 6 so far. I am using English and Russian keyboard, and this is the first time they get it configured properly in the Gnome keyboard layout (System->Preferences->Keyboard->Layouts tab) automatically during system install. I could just sit back and relax but now all of a sudden SCIM applet gets in my way. It shows three different keyboards totally unrelated to Gnome setup. And while switching keyboard in Gnome works as per Keyboard dialog setup (and not SCIM setup unless unusual keystroke is used), having it informing me that I am using Raw Code Unicode keyboard is unnecessary and is confusing. There should be one single point for configuring keyboard and language preferences. The bottom line is, bury SCIM deep in the system as it used to be, and do not let user see or interact with it directly under any circumstances. Seeing garbage keyboards in SCIM and font changing to gibberish while typing can be frightening to unexperienced users, and it certainly turns me off. Hope this will be fixed with the next release. Also need reference to SCIM and how it works within the system to educate myself on the subject. I believe that everything is there for a reason, and if SCIM is included with Alpha 6 the way it is, I'd like to know the reason for that so that collectively we could come to better solution then just burying the whole thing.

[nyékhelyi gábor (n0gabor)]

I can confirm this bug.
This SCIM shit should be disabled by default. It's confusing for the user because of the multiple places for setting keyboard layouts.
And this gtk scim client doesn't fit in the GNOME/Ubuntu ideology, not a simple, not a transparent application, confusing for the user.
And I can't quit from the program, because it restarts itself (by the time amsn freezes because of this).

[csokun (chornsokun)]

I am so agree; it so annoy when type something and the keyboard layout start to change.
+1 @nyékhelyi gábor

[Martin Meyer (elreydetodo)]

Can we at least make it so shift+space doesn't activate it? I have a tendency to not fully release the shift key as I'm pressing space, so I too am accidentally switching to arameic keyboard layout mid-sentence. This has been driving me ape shit for a week now!

---

SCIM is an interesting idea, but I see several issues:
- Most people don't need it, so it should be an option.
- GNOME already has a capplet for this, so SCIM should just be an extension of that (for quick access).
- There's no way I can find to disable it. I removed it and had to remove ubuntu-desktop along with it!
- The default key bindings are absurd.
- The setup dialog is the most non-HIG compliant thing I've ever seen. It's confused, poorly organized, and badly worded.
- There's no need for that tray icon. What are we, Windows?

I think this should definitely be an optional thing for Hardy. At least turn it off by default!

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

This bug is a duplicate of bug 199030 and is being marked as such. The other bug report contains detailed information, particularly comments 25 and 32, about how the bug came about and ways to work around the issue. Please see it for more information.