Setting up Pop!_OS 22.04

Posting in English because I have not successfully configured Japanese inputs :(

Overall direction: the customization should be kept light and things should "just work" out of the box.

Installation

It's super simple. First boot presents an installation wizard, and following it gave me a clean Pop!_OS environment. Great!

Cursor and Lean

Installed the AppImage at https://www.cursor.com/ja. The app image is put under ~/appimages. Since the cursor command doesn't work, I added the following function to ~/.bashrc.

# User edited sections
cursor() {
  /home/pandaman/appimages/Cursor-0.49.6-x86_64.AppImage "$@" &> "$(mktemp /tmp/cursor.XXXXX)" &
}

In Cursor, I installed the Lean extension, elan was installed via the Lean extension.

Terminal font

The terminal looks ugly even though I updated editor.fontFamily to 'Noto Sans Mono CJK JP', 'Droid Sans Mono', 'monospace', monospace. The font seems to be correctly applied, but the texts feel... too packed in the X axis.

Display Scaling

I bought Pangolin, which comes with a 2560×1600 display, and the UI elements and texts are too small by default.

I could set up display scaling, but 2x sclaing was too much. There is an option to enable fractal scaling, but I'm not sure how it's supported in Linux/X... At the moment, I resorted to defaulting Firefox to 133% scaling, and adjusting the font sizes in different applications.

To update the font sizes of the Gnome UIs, I installed gnome-tweaks, and updated the default fonts in the "Fonts" tab.

Japanese inputs

I use HHKB Type-S with Japanese key layout. I found it very intuitive to use "Eisuu" and "Kana" to set the input language (with Mac mode on via the physical switch), and I wanted to replicate the experience in Pangolin.

In "Language Support" (Gengo Support), Pop!_OS suggested installing ibus and ibus-mozc. Following the "just work" philosophy, I opted to install it. While I could turn Japanese inputs on/off through the UI after configuring Japanese (Mozc) as the input source, I couldn't make the "Eisuu" and "Kana" keys switch the input language in Mozc. I tried to set it as the keyboard shortcut in the Mozc property window, but it just didn't recognize the two keys.

According to xev, "Eisuu" and "Kana" are recognized as keycode 131 (keysym 0xff34, Hangul_Hanja) and keycode 130 (keysym 0xff31, Hangul), respectively.