The problem

  • Diacritics or the compose key not working in Konsole (the KDE terminal emulator),
  • certain parts of my desktop, e. g. Krunner, only getting a small fraction of all the keys I was typing.

The solution

Changing the input method to xim. Running im-setup created a file ~/.xinputrc with the following contents:

# im-config(8) generated on Tue, 22 Aug 2017 13:00:14 +0200
run_im xim
# im-config signature: 5de73d7936d4a2337e90a24bf1fae287  -

After restarting my computer my keyboard worked again as expected.

The solutions that weren’t

Trying to set the input method to fcitx as some bug reports suggested did not help.

Versions: KDE Plasma 5.10.5, KDE Frameworks 5.37.0, Qt 5.7.1

More info: man im-config