Hi, I’m trying to use a pinyin input method to type simplified Chinese, but it doesn’t work in some apps. It works great it xed (Text Editor) and Firefox, Terminal, Thunderbird, even Calculator! But it doesn’t work in Telegram or Anki.
I tried fcitx and IBus, but both have the same issue.
fcitx have an FAQ page for this. It doesn’t seem to be a problem with GTK applications as Gedit works fine. The test for checking Qt applications must be outdated because it doesn’t make any sense. I also tried different suggested configurations for .bashrc in this Arch wiki article.
Please let me know if I need to provide any extra information, and I hope I have adequately described my problem.
Cheers.
(I couldn’t include links in my post, sorry; I guess it’s because this is a new account)
As an aside, would you know how to type pinyin tones with fcitx5? With fcitx I used a package called fcitx-m17n which added another input method to fcitx but I can’t find a way to do this with fcitx5? There is a package called fcitx5-m17n-git but it wants to remove my existing fcitx5 installation.
I’ve never had the need to type tones. You can install fcitx5-m17n-git, but it will also want you to update the other fcitx5 packages to git. The only difference is that git will build the package from source, and may be a slightly newer version (There may be a bug or two). The non git packages have already been tested.
I found a method to input pinyin using fcitx5. Install the package fcitx5-rime and enable it as an input method. Create the file ~/.local/share/fcitx5/rime/default.custom.yaml with the following content (indentation is important):
patch:
schema_list:
- schema: luna_pinyin
Select the rime IME (you may also need to click deploy to refresh the changes). You can now type pinyin by first / then a vowel a. You will be prompted with the tones for that letter.
This has the advantage of only needing one IME for both Characters and pinyin. However, I don’t yet know how their dictionary files are.
I followed your instructions but - out of curiosity - missed out the ~/.local/share/fcitx5/rime/default.custom.yaml bit to see if it would work without it. And it did! I confirmed and that file does not exist on my machine, so it looks like this solution doesn’t require that step (at least, for machines that haven’t used rime before).
By default, rime has about 6 built in IMEs. You can see them, their Chinese names at least, by opening the IME and pressing f4. This file I mentioned limits it to use only one. You can try the others, but I found that only luna_pinyin would allow tones.