Details of the problem

is easy to use but overrides keyboard shortcuts defined in certain apps. For example, the same key combination is used to place a mark in emacs when selecting an area to copy, and to activate auto-completion in kdevelop.

Solution

The easiest way is to change the key binding in the specific apps, such as emacs and kdevelop. Alternatively, you can change SCIM trigger key to something else, however this will affect all applications.

On the other hand, if you don't need to use SCIM in such apps, you may start them with the following command which will disable SCIM temporarily in a specified X application (including all KDE/Qt apps if you do not have qt im module support).

XMODIFIERS=@im=none emacs

If it's a GTK+2 based app, for example firefox, you can use this command:

XMODIFIERS=@im=none GTK_IM_MODULE=xim firefox

Otherwise if you have qt im module patch applied to your Qt, you can evoke the following command to prevent SCIM from being used in a specific KDE/Qt based app (say skype):

XMODIFIERS=@im=none QT_IM_MODULE=xim skype