IBus

IBus is a bus for various input methods.

Installation

Enabling IBus is described in the manual. To enable it is as follows:

❄︎ /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

{ pkgs, lib, ... }:
{
  i18n.inputMethod = {
    enable = true;
    type = "ibus";
    ibus.engines = with pkgs.ibus-engines; [
      # Your engines here
    ];
  };
}

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Available engines are listed under the pkgs.ibus-engines attribute set. The list of available engines can be viewed in the documentation for the i18n.inputMethod.ibus.enginesoption.

After rebuilding and switching to the new configuration, you still need to logout from your session and login again for ibus to work correctly.

Troubleshooting

Custom emojis

Custom emojis can be added to the emoji selection dialog of IBus. This can be used to workaround the fact that GTK does not support compose rules which output more than one unicode codepoint. Here an example Home Manager snippet.

❄︎ ~/.config/home-manager/home.nix

{ pkgs, lib, config, ... }:
let
  /* define here the list of desired favorite emoji */
  fav = {
    shrug = ''¯\_(ツ)_/¯'';
    "markdown-shrug" = ''¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯'';
    flip = ''(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻'';
  };
in
{
  dconf.settings."desktop/ibus/panel/emoji" = with lib.hm.gvariant; {
    favorite-annotations = mkArray type.string (lib.attrNames fav);
    favorites = mkArray type.string (lib.attrValues fav);
  };
}

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Then, pressing Ctrl+Shift+e and then typing shrug, then hitting Space and Return will insert ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

See also

• Locales