I have SCIM and UTF-8 working smoothly with pretty much every program other than emacs. Here is a narrative of the process I went through; you can skip to the end to see immediately all of what is needed.

A while ago, I installed Scim pretty painlessly for Gtk and Qt apps with the following commands:

scim -d
export GTKIMMODULE=scim
export QTIMMODULE=scim

But for some reason, I couldn't get the more generic XIM working, which would magically allow everything in X to use SCIM and thus input japanese characters. The magic incantations was supposed to just be:

export XMODIFIERS='@im=SCIM'

Note that the uppercase SCIM is intentional. Well, as it turns out, I didn't have my other locale variables set right - I had set LCCTYPE='enUS.UTF-8′ and LANG too. The thing I didn't realize is that LCALL overrides, rather than behaving as a default, and Gentoo's default is LCALL=enUS. So by simply unsetting LCALL, rxvt-unicode and mlterm and Openoffice and mozilla magically starting working with SCIM and also some things that couldn't display UTF-8 before all of a sudden could.

Now, I can see japanese text in vim in the console, I can echo it and redirect to a file, I can name files with japanese chars. But the funny thing is I still don't have japanese chars or input in gvim or emacs, where you'd think it might be easier. Well, I don't care about gvim but I certainly intend to get it working in emacs.

Another cool thing I did (and the reason for a lot of this) was to write some UTF-8 xml parsing code with PXP and O'Caml. It was a wonderful experience.

To summarize, here is the process which I believe will get Gentoo japanized, if not totally internationalized:

Hopefully, you have USE="nls cjk"

Also, some japanese fonts

emerge uim scim scim-uim scim-qtimm
gtk-query-immodules-2.0 > /etc/gtk-2.0/gtk.immodules
scim -d
export GTKIMMODULE=scim
export QTIMMODULE=scim
export XMODIFIERS='@im=SCIM'
export LCALL="enUS.UTF-8″

I run them before X

Filed under: Linux by Kenn