Subin Siby

Learnings from creating an input method for GNU/Linux from a product perspective

I wanted an input tool to easily write my mother tongue Malayalam (about 37 million speakers around the world) on Ubuntu, and I came across the FOSS project called Varnam: https://varnamproject.com/ which supported many Indian languages.

It was difficult to set it up for me at the time, was 17 years old. It had to be compiled, the docs were lacking and like that reddit meme, “where the heck is the binary” was a question

I ended up using it from 2017, later contacting the maintainer, taking up maintainership, and then at the time of pandemic rewrote it from C to Go and later worked on how to make it as easy as possible to use for the end user. There are ten thousands of Ubuntu/Debian users in Kerala (mostly school students), so making the installation first class on Debian was the utmost priority.

This talk will be about the learnings of this project from the beginning to 2024 now: input methods (ibus, fcitx), wayland, packaging, bash installer etc. etc from a product perspective that makes it super easy for the end user.

Varnam library recently got packaged into Debian thanks to Guido Gunther: https://packages.debian.org/testing/libs/libgovarnam1 and is now used in GNOME Phosh’s keyboard to type Indic languages.

Source code: https://github.com/varnamproject/govarnam

A talk on the rewrite of Varnam was part of DebConf21: https://debconf21.debconf.org/talks/21-govarnam-a-new-intelligent-input-method-for-indian-languages-in-desktop-mobile/

Debian India BoF

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