HOWTO: Using Keyman for Linux with KDE

Unfortunately when using the KDE desktop environment, the support for ibus (which Keyman for Linux uses underneath) isn’t that great.

Prerequisites

As a prerequisite it is assumed that KDE Plasma, Wayland, and sddm are installed and working. This is the base for the steps described below. The steps may be appropriate for other configurations, too.

Installation and Configuration Steps

If you want to use Keyman with KDE you’ll have to do some manual steps.

Step 1 Install Keyman package

In a terminal window, run:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install keyman

If not installed, this command installs the ibus package.

This is just an example for the apt package manager, on another Linux platform there may be a different package manager and different package names.

Step 2 Enable IBus Wayland as Virtual Keyboard

Open the Virtual Keyboard dialog by launching the System Settings utility and going to "Input & Output" → "Keyboard" → "Virtual Keyboard". Select "IBus Wayland" and click the "Apply" button to configure IBus in Wayland.

Step 3 Add input methods to IBus

When installing a Keyman keyboard it gets automatically added to IBus as Input Method.

If you used a different desktop environment like Gnome before, keyboards might show up in "Keyman Configuration" but are not listed in IBus' Input Methods. In that case simply re-install the keyboard in "Keyman Configuration".

References

• https://wiki.debian.org/I18n/ibus
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/IBus
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ibus

Applies to

• Keyman for Linux

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