Re: Swapping default input method: ALIASES!

[Ilya Zakharevich]

On 2010-11-17, B. T. Raven <nihil@nihilo.net> wrote:
> A quick and dirty solution which can easily give the equivalent of
> multi-level switches is just to recode the names using aliases. You
> don't need to use the im- prefix, just M-x then L1- L15 b5, a30, or
> whatever.

  [Any solution involving M-x is, of course, not acceptable (think
   about entering a sequence of 200 chars involving 150 charset
   switches as a REPETITIVE task) - but this would be easy to
   work-around.  However, this is ORTHOGONAL to Emacs' IM framework -
   and I'm trying to find a way to just BEND the current framework to
   be closer to being usable.]

However, your word ALIAS can be easily a base of a solution.  One would need:

 a) way to define aliases to input methods;

 b) if "im-cyrillic" is an alias to "cyrillic-yawerty", it should be
    REPORTED as such in all feedbacks going to user.

 c) it should be easy to switch what "im-cyrillic" is aliased to.

I expect "a" and "c" to be trivial.  So things boil down to "b": is it
possible to make "im-cyrillic" a valid argument to IM API, but be
displayed as "im-cyrillic: alias to cyrillic-yawerty"?

A lot of thanks for this great hint,
Ilya