[tlug] Best IME for an "i18n power user" on linux?

[Darren Cook <darren@example.com>]

tl;dr: Has anyone here switched from ibus to fcitx and been delighted
they did so?


I just found some threads from a year ago where the consensus seemed to be:
  fxitx vs. ibus: no compelling reason to go with one or the other, and
both being actively developed.

  mozc vs. anthy: mozc had more fans

  Recent ubuntu/mint are not as good as Ubuntu 10.04 was for IMEs


I'm using ibus+anthy, and sorting out the mess has been regularly pushed
down my todo list for the past year! What mess?

  * The ja/en switch in the IME is global, applying to all windows. So I
can switch from writing an email in Japanese to a bash window and find
myself typing "火t" ("cat") :-(
  (The option to make it per-window existed but apparently a newer
version removed this function!)

  * compose won't work with ibus+anthy. And I couldn't (easily) work out
how to sort out the toggle keys, so when I want to type £ (when I've
recently been typing Japanese), I have to click the あ icon at the top
of the screen, choose "English keyboard", then windows+L followed by hyphen.
   And similar effort when I want to type Japanese and I've recently
used compose.
  (BTW, compose did work inside the en side of the Japanese IME in
Ubuntu 10.04)

 * I couldn't get any of the three Russian IMEs to work. (I did get
ibus-pinyin working for Mandarin input, though as with Compose above, I
have to use the mouse to switch to it.) I also don't have a working
Arabic IME (though I cannot find any failure notes, so maybe I just
haven't tried installing it yet...)


That was a year ago, but recently I found an upgrade to GnuCash (or the
upgrade from Mint 16 to Mint 17, i.e. Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04) has a bug,
where backspace and cursor keys don't work. The fix is to do "ibus
exit", then start GnuCash again. It works like magic... until I need to
input Japanese in another application. Then I need to logout and login
to get ibus back.

I was happy-ish to live with this, but today I was evaluating the
CodeLite IDE, and it has exactly the same problem, and again `ibus exit`
fixes it. This is more of an issue - an IDE is not much use to me if I
can only type ascii into it.


Anyone using CodeLite 7 (or GnuCash 2.6) with fcitx, and can confirm it
works?

And does fcitx work per-window, not globally?

And is anyone using all of Compose, Japanese and at least one other IME
with fcitx and want to boast that it all Just Works?

Advice on any of the above warmly welcome :-)

Darren

P.S. I'm using Mint 17 + xfce, but the carrot of beautifully working
IMEs could easily lead me to another desktop, or even another distro.