Re: address@hidden: Re: X Input Methods support is not very convenient]

[Richard Stallman]

    This is implementation-dependent with each method, and the user should
    know.  In the normal circumstance, users will set LANG and XMODIFIERS
    in their shell environments, Emacs inherits, no problem.

Are you saying that everything ought to work now, in the simplest case
where someone sets these environment variables and then starts Emacs
and uses that X input method?  (Does Emacs in fact work in this case?)

The idea of being able to change X input methods within Emacs
sounds useful, if someone wants to do it.  What would Emacs
have to do to switch this in mid-session?

    The current problem arises when a user is multilingual but wants to
    use XIM.  Setting LANG outside of Emacs to the locale in which they
    plan to use XIM can cause problems in buffers used for other languages
    (the user has to undo the automatic setting of the language
    environment according to the locale in Emacs's environment).

It is not hard to specify a different language environment in Emacs.

                                                                  Also,
    there can be annoyances when the environment is passed to
    subprocesses, such as those used by dired and ange-ftp.


                                                             So it seems
    like the easiest way to get it all right is to avoid disturbing
    current Mule language environment mechanisms, and allow the user to
    specify her own LC_CTYPE and XMODIFIERS for XIM within XEmacs (maybe
    in .emacs or with command-line siwtches), and leave that up to her.

We can set this up through the process-environment variable, or some
other interface, easily enough.  We just have to know what Emacs
should do to activate a different X input method.

One other thing--should the choice of input method be buffer-local?
If so, is there anything better we can do than tell X to change input
methods each time the user switches buffers?


The idea of integrating the selection of X input methods with the
selection of Emacs input methods is a good one--that would be a clean
way to do things.  Since Emacs input methods are buffer-specific, this
would require that we implement buffer-specific choice of X input
methods.  I think once that is done it will be easy to integrate
the two interfaces at the Lisp level even if they are controlled
by different C primitives.