Comment 5 for bug 6606

Okay, since many developers are not familar with input methods at all, I'll give some background introduction.

SCIM supports three input method mode: XIM mode, GTK IM mode, and Qt IM mode. XIM mode is an old and established protocol, implemented by XFree86/Xorg (I don't know exactly which part). Both GTK and Qt IM mode are rather new. GTK IM mode is implemented by GTK+ 2.x, and Qt IM mode is implemented by said patch to Qt 3 and (according to what I heard) Qt 4 upstream.

SCIM has XIM mode support by default. The GTK IM mode support is in scim-gtk2-immodule package. The Qt IM mode is in scim-qtimm package.

GTK+/Qt apps can also use XIM mode _in additional to_ the GTK/Qt IM mode. The environment variable GTK_IM_MODULE and QT_IM_MODULE is used to control which mode is used. Non GTK+/Qt apps (such as Motif ones) can only use XIM mode.

This bug is about XIM mode not working in KDE. On IRC freeflying said skim/scim-qtimm works fine, but I suspect that means those Qt applications are using the Qt IM mode, not XIM mode. Also in my testing GTK+ apps works fine with scim in GTK IM mode (but non-GTK apps, including Qt apps, don't have input method).

One thing worth trying is to see if apps using neither GTK nor Qt works in KDE, for example xterm. It works fine for me in GNOME. This really requires someone familar with input methods, though. Or a step-by-step howto by someone familar with IMs.