Re: [tlug] IMEs in Mint?

[Jens Oliver John <lists@example.com>]

> I seem to have the choice between Mate and Cinnamon desktops; will that
> choice influence availability and quality of IMEs?

Not at all, as these are both GTK based (GTK2 and GTK3, respectively). However,
for each GUI toolkit, your input method framework must provide a front end that
supports it. To my knowledge, the most prominent are scim, uim, ibus and as of
late fcitx. All of them can be used with the major toolkits GTK2/3 and Qt4. Qt5
is AFAIK available only fcitx as of now.

> I'm wondering if anyone has any horror stories (or any advice generally)
> about getting Japanese input working. (My current machine (ubuntu 10.04)
> uses Anthy, but also has IMEs for Arabic, Chinese "py", and Chinese
> pinyin, so I'm hoping  installing those won't be an issue either.)

Horror stories, mostly related to configuration issues there are many to tell,
but I would like to make some few comments based on my own experience:

  * The Anthy input method is horrible, in terms of kana->kanji conversion based 
    frequency and automatically building a user dictionary. Although there is a
    patched version out there which brings in substantial improvements in these
    aspects, I think it is readily available only in Arch [1].

  * A better alternative which is ATM only available in conjunction with fcitx
    is mozc, based on Google Japanese Input for Android. It is *much* better,
    has built-in usage info and overall comes the closest to the other
    proprietary IMs from OS X and Windows (which I have to admit are still worlds
    better). The package that provides the binding to fcitx in Debian is
    mozc-fcitx. It also comes with a nice handwriting recognition tool,
    dictionary editor and stuff. These tools are by default not in $PATH (hidden
    ;-), you find them in /usr/lib/mozc/mozc_tool (<- all-in-one binary).

  * Furthermore, fcitx has more "power-user" functionality exposed than ibus, e.g.
    you can easily tell it to preserve a custom xkb layout by running xmodmap
    when required, among others. Its development is very active and it's only
    getting better. Overall, I found it to be way more user-friendly than ibus.

  * fcitx is being developed mainly by a Chinese person. Naturally, Chinese
    IMs are supported very well. There are dozens of IM bindings available as of
    now, Arabic ones I have no experience with, put a quick search tells me
    fcitx-table-arabic is available in Debian right now.

  * ^ Be that as it may: The developers are also quite responsive for both bug
    reports and feature requests [2]. So should you miss something, you might be
    able to get it implemented pretty fast.

That being said, I have no idea how you'd configure them properly in a DE. I
always use the good old ~/.xsession method with a window manager; with fcitx,
I've had no issues whatsoever so far and would only recommend it.

Regards,
Jens.

--
[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/anthy-kaomoji/
[2] https://github.com/fcitx/fcitx