A simple polybar module for Input Bus users.
- A more precise and suitable status for IBus
- m17n or other input engines support
- Capslock and Numlock support
- Shortcuts for quickly switching engines and opening IBus setting panel with mouse left click and right click
- No systray needed
- More to come
Currently, this module don’t work very smoothly like xkeyboard in
the official polybar modules. It takes time to communicate with
ibus-daemon. Therefore, there are a 3~5 seconds delay to toggle the
status change :/ If you only use xkeyboard(xkb), I strongly suggest
you use the official module without IBus.
- ibus(ibus-daemon/ibus-setup)
- rofi There is a great chance that they are already in your distro’s official/community/user repositories. If not, download, build and install from IBus and Rofi’s source.
First, you need to make sure that ibus-daemon is running. You can
use pgrep -x ibus-daemon to check.
Move scripts/ to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/polybar/ if you don’t
have this directory; otherwise, move all the scripts to the already
existed scripts/ directory. Keep in mind that the scripts need to
be under scripts/ to work.
# assume that the directory doesn't exist and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is $HOME/.config
$ mv scripts/ ~/.config/polybarCopy the content below to your polybar configuration
file(config/config.ini…).
[module/ibus]
type = custom/script
exec = ~/.config/polybar/scripts/ibus-engine.sh &
; you need to run ibus-daemon first for the script to work
exec-if = pgrep -x ibus-daemon
tail = true
format-background = ${color.mb}
format-padding = ${layout.module-padding}
click-left = ~/.config/polybar/scripts/ibus-switch.sh &
click-right = ~/.config/polybar/scripts/ibus-setting.sh &Change scripts/ibus-engine.sh to use your favorite icons/glyphs. Optionally,
you can take a look at and load the font I use(in fonts/) into your
system(Don’t forget to modify your font configuration in config).
That’s it! Then you can:
- change the engine using keyboard shortcuts defined in IBus setting to see the status in polybar.
- Left-click to get an available engines menu with rofi(You need to set them in Ibus setting first)
- Right-click to open IBus setting.
The module is able to show up to 3 fields on the polybar when the user toggles an IBus engine. They are engine type, keyboard layout ,as well as its variant(if any) and language.
Let’s take American dvorak keyboard(in IBus, xkb:us:dvorak:eng) for example:
- engine type: xkb(X keyboard)
- keyboard layout: us; variant: dvorak
- language: eng(English)
So your polybar will show:
[icon] xkb [icon] us - dvorak [icon] eng
Engine type always exists, while the other three don’t. So you may see some engines show only one or two fields(i.e. rime):
[icon] rime [icon] sys
It’s worth knowing that Ibus might remap keyboard and shadow
settings from setxkbmap to some extent. If you don’t want to use
IBus’s keyboard layout, you can set up IBus to use system’s
layout(ibus-setup or right click the module on polybar). This way,
polybar will show sys as keyboard layout.
If you left click on the module, you will be given a rofi menu asking you what engine you would like to use. However, the format of each engine name is a bit strange. In fact, the format is IBus’s engine name, and the four fields separated by colons matches the three fields mentioned above, with the first field being the engine type, the second and third being the layout, and the last field being the language. For example:
xkb:ru::rus xkb:ru:phonetic:rus m17n:ru:phonetic
They are, respectively:
- Russian Keyboard(Xkeyboard)
- Russian Phonetic Keyboard(Xkeyboard)
- Russian Phonetic Keyboard(m17n)
Intended to keep the scripts simple and short, I decided this is currently the best way to list engines in a menu(if you know a better way, welcome to leave a PR!), since if you can read the status displayed by polybar, you should be able to understand these entries.
- [-] implement shortcuts for ibus-emoji.
- [-] make the scripts faster and more efficient.
- [-] provide a more human-readable menu for engine selection