I often use Qt-based applications. Because this thing is cross-platform, it's quite popular.

But as a Chinese user running ibus + Qt, I constantly run into this annoying issue—when typing Chinese, ibus opens fine and the input itself is mostly okay, except that every time I type Chinese, the candidate tray keeps dangling in the bottom-left corner. Jeez, is it trying to give my eyeballs a workout?

You can find all sorts of solutions online, but most people blame ibus and suggest installing ibus-qt. After installing it, nothing changes. I thought maybe I needed to restart ibus, but that didn't work either; rebooting the whole system didn't help. This package might be useful for later steps, but at the very least, simply installing it alone does nothing.

After more searching, I came across this blog post.

The general steps are as follows:

First, install qtconfig.

In the blog post mentioned above, the author was on Ubuntu, so the package name may be slightly different. On my Fedora 19, I needed to install qt-config. So:

Bash
# yum install -y qt-config
Then run:
Bash
qtconfig-qt4
A Qt configuration window should appear.

Two things to note

  1. By querying `qt*config*`, you'll find two packages in the repos: `qt-config` and `qt3-config`. I suspect Qt3's configuration is somewhat special? Since I use Qt4, I didn't install the other one. If you have specific needs, you can give it a try.
  2. Essentially, qtconfig seems to just pop up a GUI and modify configuration files under the user's `~/`, so you should configure it as the current user. The upside is that you can back up the configuration directly along with your other files.

Then go to the Interface tab, and under XIM input style select Over the spot. The blog post mentioned earlier recommends choosing XIM as the default input method; I tried selecting ibus instead and it worked perfectly.

That's it.

Postscript:

As time goes by, Qt has now reached version 5, and this magical thing still doesn't work properly in many places. Tragic. I'll just keep an eye on it occasionally and hope for progress in ten years. sigh