Unicode input not working on Bionic with CTRL-SHIFT-U

Thanks for your report.

I can confirm the issue on an updated bionic. <Ctrl>+<Shift>+<U> appears to do nothing.

It's probably a result of some of the most recent package updates, but I can't tell either which package is the culprit.

@Jeremy: Do you which would be the right package for this bug?

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I downgraded the binaries built by gtk+3.0 to 3.22.25-0ubuntu1 (same as Artful, where it works) but it didn't help.

The issue is indeed due to ibus changes, see https://github.com/ibus/ibus/issues/1961

Basically they added an emoji picker (which you can start with "ibus emoji") and make that displayed with ctrl-shift-e (in 1.5.18) and deprecated ctrl-shift-u since that can conflicts with some applications keybinding. Updating to .18 would give us the new picker but not the old feature back, I'm pondering distro patching that simple change that has been proposed upstream bug rejected

https://github.com/ibus/ibus/issues/1962

see also https://github.com/ibus/ibus/issues/1981

Thanks for fixing this, Sebastien!

When I saw your oneliner in the queue, I did some tests. Without having your ibus-fix in place, I opened gnome-language-selector, selected "none" instead of "IBus", and re-logged in. That disables im-config's variable settings, and only the IM related variables which GNOME sets by default are present:

$ env | grep -E 'XMOD|_IM'
QT_IM_MODULE=ibus
XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus

And it made Ctrl+Shift+U work.

These are the variables with im-config enabled:

$ env | grep -E 'XMOD|_IM'
CLUTTER_IM_MODULE=xim
QT4_IM_MODULE=xim
QT_IM_MODULE=ibus
XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus

I also tried to just edit ~/.profile and add:

unset GTK_IM_MODULE

That proved to be sufficient to bring Ctrl+Shift+U back.

I'm not able to tell the significance of setting GTK_IM_MODULE to "ibus", but that's what we currently do through im-config, and Ubuntu is the only distro AFAIK which installs im-config by default. So the issue is kind of Ubuntu specific, and now we have an Ubuntu specific ibus-patch.

My first reaction was to try to convince upstream to change their mind. I'm not as sure about that now.

This bug was fixed in the package ibus - 1.5.17-3ubuntu3

---------------
ibus (1.5.17-3ubuntu3) bionic; urgency=medium

  * debian/patches/ubuntu-conditional-chmod.patch: backport an upstream commit
    to make a call to chmod conditional, to avoid apparmor denials for confined
    apps (e.g. snaps) that use libibus (LP: #1761585)

ibus (1.5.17-3ubuntu2) bionic; urgency=medium

  * debian/patches/ubuntu-unicode-keybinding.patch:
    - use a change proposed/rejected upstream to restore ctrl-shift-u,
      upstream consider it superseeded by the emoji selector but that has
      no keybinding in our ibus version and is not an exact replacement
      (lp: #1760308)

 -- Olivier Tilloy <email address hidden> Fri, 06 Apr 2018 11:04:22 +0200