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Silent Compose

Silent Compose is an input method for silent US-International-style composition.

Press '        -> nothing visible
Then press e   -> é

The pending accent stays private. Applications only receive the final committed text.

💻 Supported

• Fedora Workstation 44, packaged as an RPM
• Fedora Atomic variants, layered with rpm-ostree
• Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04 or newer, packaged as a .deb
• Other x86_64 distributions, through the generic .run installer
• GNOME Wayland
• IBus 1.5 or newer
• GTK 4.2 or newer
• x86_64

Verified in Brave native Wayland, Electron apps, JetBrains IDEs, and GTK 4 apps.

✨ Features

• GNOME input source: English (US, intl. Silent Compose)
• IBus backend for system-wide Wayland use
• GTK 4 IM module
• No visible preedit text
• No app-specific flags or launcher edits
• No X11 wrapper
• Shortcuts such as Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Alt, and Super still pass through

Examples

First key	Second key	Output
'	e	é
'	E	É
"	u	ü
"	U	Ü
`	a	à
^	o	ô
~	n	ñ
'	c	ç
'	C	Ç
'	Space	'
"	Space	"
`	Space	`
^	Space	^
~	Space	~
'	'	''
"	"	""

etc...

Unsupported printable sequences preserve input. Example: ' then t commits 't.

🚀 Installation

Fedora Workstation, COPR repository

sudo dnf install dnf-plugins-core
sudo dnf copr enable almighty-shogun/silent-compose
sudo dnf install silent-compose

systemctl --user restart org.freedesktop.IBus.session.GNOME.service

Fedora Atomic, COPR repository

Silverblue, Kinoite, Bazzite, Aurora, and other ostree-based variants layer the same RPM. They do not all ship dnf, so add the COPR repository by writing its repo file directly:

sudo curl -o /etc/yum.repos.d/almighty-shogun-silent-compose.repo \
    "https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/almighty-shogun/silent-compose/repo/fedora-$(rpm -E %fedora)/almighty-shogun-silent-compose-fedora-$(rpm -E %fedora).repo"
sudo rpm-ostree install silent-compose
systemctl reboot

Updates arrive with your normal system upgrade: sudo dnf upgrade on Fedora Workstation, or sudo rpm-ostree upgrade followed by a reboot on Fedora Atomic. On Workstation, restart IBus or log out afterwards so the new engine loads.

Debian and Ubuntu

Download and install the release package:

curl -LO "https://github.com/Almighty-Shogun/silent-compose/releases/latest/download/silent-compose.deb"
sudo apt install ./silent-compose.deb

apt pulls in ibus and the GTK 4 runtime if they are missing. The package refreshes the GTK 4 module cache and the IBus registry on install.

Other distributions

The .run installer carries prebuilt x86_64 binaries and works on any distribution with glibc 2.36 or newer, GTK 4.2 or newer, and IBus 1.5 or newer. It detects the GTK 4 IM module directory for the host, which differs between distributions, and installs under /usr.

Note

The .run installer refuses to run on atomic systems, because /usr is read-only there. Layer the RPM with rpm-ostree instead.

curl -LO "https://github.com/Almighty-Shogun/silent-compose/releases/latest/download/silent-compose.run"
chmod +x silent-compose.run
sudo ./silent-compose.run

Show where the GTK 4 module would be installed, without installing anything:

./silent-compose.run --print-immodules-dir

Pass --immodules-dir DIR when detection picks the wrong directory.

Selecting the input source

Restart the GNOME IBus user service so GNOME can see the newly installed engine:

systemctl --user restart org.freedesktop.IBus.session.GNOME.service

Then select Silent Compose in GNOME Settings:

Settings -> Keyboard -> Input Sources -> English (United States) -> English (US, intl. Silent Compose)

Use English (US, intl. Silent Compose), not GNOME's built-in English (US, intl., with dead keys).

Check:

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.input-sources sources
ibus engine

Expected:

[('ibus', 'silent-compose')]
silent-compose

If the engine still does not appear, log out and back in.

🧹 Uninstall

# Fedora
sudo dnf remove silent-compose

# Fedora Atomic
sudo rpm-ostree uninstall silent-compose
systemctl reboot

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt remove silent-compose

# Generic
sudo ./silent-compose.run --uninstall

🔧 Build

Install build dependencies on Fedora:

sudo dnf install gcc meson ninja-build pkgconf-pkg-config gtk4-devel glib2-devel ibus-devel

Install build dependencies on Debian and Ubuntu:

sudo apt install gcc meson ninja-build pkg-config libgtk-4-dev libglib2.0-dev libibus-1.0-dev

Meson 1.2.0 or newer is required. Debian 12 ships 1.0.1, so install a newer Meson with pip3 install --break-system-packages "meson>=1.2.0" there.

Build:

meson setup build
meson compile -C build
meson test -C build --print-errorlogs

Release versions come from plain Git tags such as 0.2.0. Untagged local builds use the development fallback version 0.0.0.

Fedora RPMs, Debian packages, and the generic .run installer are produced by the GitHub release workflow. Packaging inputs live under packaging/fedora, packaging/debian, and packaging/run.

Files installed

Typical Fedora paths:

/usr/lib64/gtk-4.0/immodules/libsilent-compose.so
/usr/libexec/silent-compose-ibus
/usr/share/ibus/component/org.freedesktop.IBus.SilentCompose.xml

Typical Debian and Ubuntu paths:

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gtk-4.0/immodules/libsilent-compose.so
/usr/libexec/silent-compose-ibus
/usr/share/ibus/component/org.freedesktop.IBus.SilentCompose.xml

Only the GTK 4 module directory differs between distributions. It is taken from gtk4.pc, so it follows whatever layout the host uses.

The package does not modify GNOME settings, keyboard layouts, or application launchers.

🩺 Debugging

SILENT_COMPOSE_DEBUG=1

The IBus engine also appends key-routing diagnostics to /tmp/silent-compose-ibus.log by default because IBus can redirect engine stderr to /dev/null. Set SILENT_COMPOSE_DEBUG_LOG to choose a different path.

Keep debug logging disabled during normal typing because it records key events.