Fix cedilha Fedora 42 Gnome 48

I am Brazilian, so I am often typing in Portuguese, and in the last 15 years as a Linux user configuring keyboard and keyboard layouts in Linux to have the ability of easily typing this character was always a ritual to be performed every time I installed a fresh Linux OS.

Today is the day to face this challenge with my current OS of choice, Bluefin Project, which is not an OS… well it’s complicated. Anyway, let’s start the search with the latest Google model, Gemini 3.0.

The first suggestion is the creation of ~/.config/environment.d/cedilha.conf and adding a couple of lines to “force” use of the cedilla module. This method did not work.

Second suggestion was about editing a .XCompose file. The name of the file got me suspicious since I am running wayland it sounded like an old way of fixing but I found out that this method do work. The library that manages the keyboard on wayland still maintain support for the .XCompose from X11. On top of that we have Gnome that ignores .XCompose by deafult. So we need to force Gnome and QT to use xim (X Input Method) and then have the .XCompose setup to replace the keystrokes ’+c into ç.

Force xim

mkdir -p ~/.config/environment.d && printf "GTK_IM_MODULE=xim\nQT_IM_MODULE=xim\n" > ~/.config/environment.d/cedilha.conf

Config .XCompose

printf 'include "%%L"\n<dead_acute> <c> : "ç" Ccedilla\n<dead_acute> <C> : "Ç" Ccedilla\n' > ~/.XCompose

Next stes?

I guess the best would be to have my own CI/CD action building my system .iso which is how Project Bluefin operates to create the image I used to install this current system. And to my understand anyone can do the same even using their repository as base and adding on top of it.

🤔

Well, maybe a project idea for the next article. For now, I need to go back to C++<insert a version\>.