Hey, did you hear of ibus?

    I installed a video-conferencing app on monday, to possibly join a
meeting. It came with plenty of dependencies, including something called
"ibus". There is a Debian packege for it available on Devuan.

    According to the poor man page and online documentation, this is an
"Intelligent Input Bus". AFAIU, it is a layer between keyboard
keystrokes, mouse-moves and mouse-clicks and the input to an application
- all user inputs merged in one channel. The goal is to plug into it
various interfaces to express complex characters and/or ideograms by
composing several keystrokes. Kind of keyboard to Unicode interface.
Excellent idea if this was done by using just a command and piping the
output to the application needing it.

    It is implemented on both Mac (therefore free-BSD), and Linux.
Dunno how it is made on Free-BSD, but on Linux it is - guess what - a
daemon!, further more, applications must talk to this daemon through -
guess what - Dbus!

    I discovered this because, after a reboot, this daemon, normally
unseen, suddenly popped up a small window on my desktop to remind me
that the new keystroke to perform wtf was shift-space. Actually this
daemon was sitting there all the time.

    I addition, it turned my English keyboard to a US one. Not the real
keyboard, of course, but the key mapping, when I type a double-quote, I
get an arrowbas!

    <parenthesis>I like US keyboard because I started writing programs
40 years ago when there was only US keyboards and ASCII, but it is
impossible to buy an HP laptop with a US keyboard in France; you can
only buy one with a keyboard of any European type or Saoudian. I chose
UK which is the closest to US.</parenthesis>

    After uninstalling ibus, and dependencies, my keyboard mapping is
correct again.

    There's now a fashion of doing all innovations in a complicated
way. It seems developpers have become unable to think simple. This is
terribly disapointing.

        Didier