Re: Changing the environment of a running process
>>>>> "Jan" == Jan Willem Stumpel <jstumpel@planet.nl> writes:
> In a few programs (e.g. Mozilla, Openoffice) I sometimes want to
> input European text, sometimes Japanese text. Omitting various
> details, this involves starting the program in a specific
> "environment", e.g.
> LANG=ja_JP mozilla
> when I want to use Japanese in Mozilla.
> For other languages, another instance of Mozilla has to be
> started, in which the LANG environment variable is set to, e.g.,
> "en_US" (or just to the default, "C").
> So I am jealous of MS Windows users who (if they have downloaded
> the appropriate stuff) have a little box on their screen which
> they can click on to switch the input from (e.g.) "Japanese" to
> "English". In modern versions of MS Word, for instance, it is no
> problem to input Japanese as well as several European dialects
> (with accents, etc.) into the same document.
> The key to doing something similar in Linux would seem to be the
> ability to change the "environment" of a running process on the
> fly. Is this possible, in principle?
Unforturnately, what you want isn't availiable right now. And it
doesn't seem that anyone has the time or effort to do it. (I wish I
had the time, since this is on my wishlist.) People tend to avoid
this question/problem, probably because not that many people want to
mix languages. (The majority of people using computer are either
mono-lingual, or speak/use English/Latin-1 only on the computer.)
I think it is possible, in principle. The question is "Is is possible
with out a complete rewrite of a lot of code?" I'm not in any
position to comment on the doability of it though. Hope to look into
it "soon".
> P.S. There is a Debian package called xxkb which claims to
> switch the "keyboard state" between English and Russian. Does
> this go some way to providing the solution? The documentation is
> only in Russian, which I do not understand.
I don't think that's what you're looking for. It seems to be
something that adjusts keyboard mappings. But you want something to
change input METHODS.
Good luck.
Marshal
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