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Wayland virtual keyboards and input methods

Working notes on why virtual-keyboard input and input-method keyboard grabs occupy different paths in the Wayland stack.

A recurring source of confusion is that producing key events is not necessarily the same thing as participating in the input-method path. Compositors mediate both sides, and protocol choice changes what an IME can observe.

Why I care

This question surfaced while building TouchDeck, where synthetic key events need to coexist with normal text input and Rime-based composition.