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I'm trying to enter a tab character in Firefox/Chrome text boxes without having to copy-paste from Emacs. The combination Ctrl+Shift+U then 0009 does not work. In fact, it does not seem to work for most "control" characters. However, it works for pretty much any printable character including non-ASCII. This is really bizarre. Google doesn't seem to reveal any such inconsistent behavior. Anyone know why this combination bans whitespace? I can repeat this behavior in any program including Leafpad and LibreOffice.

U+2023: ‣
U+0100: Ā
U+0009: (nothing)
U+000A: (nothing)
U+0020: (space)

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    Not that it helps particularily, but the problem is tied to your configuration, i.e. that's not something supposed to happen (I can insert all of those). I wouldn't know that to suggest though.
    – kos
    Oct 15, 2015 at 16:49
  • Thanks @kos. I actually made a breakthrough. I can type the tab character via that shortcut only as root! Not sure what's going on yet but I will keep investigating.
    – user461539
    Oct 23, 2015 at 2:19

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Got it. The reason it was working as root and not my regular user was because the environment variables GTK_IM_MODULE and QT_IM_MODULE were being forced to xim for all regular users, regardless of runs of im-config. The only module I have installed under Lubuntu is ibus, so I'm not surprised by this strange behavior. A few articles on the net brought those variables to my attention so I started debugging around them. When I noticed they were being set to xim persistently, I decided to force them to ibus under /etc/environment. You have the less aggressive option of setting them in .bashrc or some equivalent. Regardless, this will restore full Ctrl+Shift+U functionality.

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  • thank you! in my Linux Mint I was able to modify the input method from a GUI app (search for Input) and set it to none (instead of xim). To have it work I had to restart the X session (maybe that's why your im-config was ignored?).
    – Ciprian Tomoiagă
    Jan 29, 2016 at 1:11

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