Celeb Glow
news | April 01, 2026

Ibus incompatible with Tor Browser in 13.10

I have recently updated to 13.10 from 13.04 and noticed a compatibility issue between the new Ibus and the Tor Browser.

Basically, the Tor Browser does not accept any keyboard inputs, while all other programs do. I tested this with the 64 bit versions 2.3.25-11 and 2.3.25-13 and the 32 bit version 2.3.25-13.

According to this thread, quitting ibus "fixes" the problem:

Any ideas on how to fix this?

3 Answers

Type this in a terminal:

ibus exit

Such a simple answer took forever to find. :)

2

I found this fix:

1 - gedit /path/to/start-tor-browser

2 - Add the following line on the second line (immediately after the line containing shebang interpreter directive - #!/bin/sh):

export GTK_IM_MODULE="xim"

The above line change the default value (ibus - Intelligent Input Bus, an input method framework for multilingual input) for GTK_IM_MODULE environment variable (which specifies an input method module to use) to xim (X Input Method).

3 - Save and close the file

4 - Run the tor script in terminal

sh /path/to/start-tor-browser

Worked for me using the 64bit version of Tor-Browser, this issue doe not affect the 32bit.

BUG

Unfortunately I'm unable to comment on the above answer, but I just wanted to point out that this is a known bug and is recorded here along with various work arounds:

Personally, I just went to Language Support and changed my 'Keyboard input method system' to none.

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