I'd love to easily use screenkey on elementary OS to include key presses on screenrecordings but there seem to be input method issues.
Installing screenkey (0.9-2) by using sudo apt install screenkey and then starting it from the command line I'm seeing this error:
Exception in thread Thread-1:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/threading.py", line 801, in __bootstrap_inner
self.run()
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/Screenkey/keylistener.py", line 245, in run
raise Exception("Cannot initialize input method")
Exception: Cannot initialize input method
When I try the same with a cloned version of the latest version from gitlab.com/wavexx/screenkey I get a helpfull popup pointing to a troubleshoot page:
https://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/screenkey/#troubleshooting
This asked me to check the following environment variables, which should be consistent:
XMODIFIERS=@im=ibus
GTK_IM_MODULE=
QT_IM_MODULE=ibus
So it's not, and apparently I'm not running ibus:
$ pgrep -ax ibus-daemon
Finally following their advice and resetting all these environment variables before running it does work.
unset XMODIFIERS
unset GTK_IM_MODULES
unset QT_IM_MODULES
screenkey
Is there something wrong with the default elementary OS configuration?
Could I have done anything wrong? I find that these environment variables are the same on a fresh image started in a vm.
I didn't find changes to these variables in ~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile or ~/.pam_environment.
I've opened an old issue of mine that I forgot about: https://github.com/elementary/gala/issues/27
