[x] I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates.
Pre-knowledge
It's long a bit, but might be useful to overview how CJK users type English and their language:
English has only 26 characters, so all of them can be printed on the keyboard. However, some languages like Chinese or Japanese have thousands of characters so that all of them cannot be printed on the keyboard. Instead, keyboards for these languages have English characters printed, and we type the pronunciation of characters what we want and convert it to the right character.
For example, if you want to type "睡觉" (which means "sleep" in Chinese), you first type its pronunciation "shuijiao" and then select the right character from the candidate list, which shows possible characters for that pronunciation (in this example, 谁叫 which means "it can't be helped" or 水饺 which means "boiled gyoza" have this pronunciation).
However, we sometimes want to type English characters. So there are two modes: one is to type English and the other is to type their language. If you select English mode, you can type English, and the other allows you to type CJK language.
Describe the bug
TR; DL: there is no indication for users to know whether they will type English alphabets or their language characters.
If you set up Windows to be able to type Japanese, the taskbar has the indicator (the "A" symbol) that lets users know the current input mode. If it shows "A", then the current input mode is English, and if it shows "あ" which is a Japanese character, then you can type Japanese. I've heard macOS also has a similar indicator.
So what about Linux distributions? IBus, which is a program that handles typing CJK (we call it "input method") and elementary OS adopts, also has an indicator like this (quoted from here):
However, there is no corresponding indicator in elementary OS.
Expected behavior (or possible fix)
If there were a nice indicator for this in elementary os it would be awesome but it would need some extra work. Instead, making IBus show its "property panel" by default should be easy and also work.
This is the property panel. You can set up to show it in IBus Preferences, but showing it by default is better because that can let users that they can type CJK in the latest elementary OS by default―different from the one a couple of years ago (Freya or Loki); I found some Japanese reviewers assert that they can't type Japanese in elementary OS by default because of lacking indicator, although it's possible to type.
Platform Information
OS: elementary OS
OS Version: Juno
[ ] I'm using the latest version from git that I've manually compiled
Prerequisites
Pre-knowledge
It's long a bit, but might be useful to overview how CJK users type English and their language:
Describe the bug
TR; DL: there is no indication for users to know whether they will type English alphabets or their language characters.
If you set up Windows to be able to type Japanese, the taskbar has the indicator (the "A" symbol) that lets users know the current input mode. If it shows "A", then the current input mode is English, and if it shows "あ" which is a Japanese character, then you can type Japanese. I've heard macOS also has a similar indicator. So what about Linux distributions? IBus, which is a program that handles typing CJK (we call it "input method") and elementary OS adopts, also has an indicator like this (quoted from here):
However, there is no corresponding indicator in elementary OS.
Expected behavior (or possible fix)
If there were a nice indicator for this in elementary os it would be awesome but it would need some extra work. Instead, making IBus show its "property panel" by default should be easy and also work.
This is the property panel. You can set up to show it in IBus Preferences, but showing it by default is better because that can let users that they can type CJK in the latest elementary OS by default―different from the one a couple of years ago (Freya or Loki); I found some Japanese reviewers assert that they can't type Japanese in elementary OS by default because of lacking indicator, although it's possible to type.
Platform Information