Re: [tlug] IMEs in Mint?

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

I must correct myself, ibus seems to have a mozc binding available now.

On Thu, Mar 06, 2014 at 03:31:12PM +0900, Jens John wrote:
> > 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
> 
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