ibus-rime - a Traditional Character Pinyin Input Method for Linux

[Koxinga]

For the lack of a better alternative, I've been using ibus-pinyin for a long time on my Ubuntu machine, but I've been very unhappy about the traditional character support. It always gave me variant characters (異體字) instead of the ones that are in common use, for example 牀 instead of 床 and  麪 instead of 麵. Some characters like 余 or 台 were impossible to type in the traditional mode.

 

ibus-rime, while having some of the same issues as ibus-pinyin, at least lets you type the characters that are impossible to type in ibus-pinyin. It also seems to have a richer vocabulary in general.

 

For Ubuntu users, you can install it by copying this into the command line: sudo apt-get install ibus-rime

Then after restarting ibus, you can choose rime in ibus preferences. You can access rime's settings by pressing F4 while using it. Unfortunately, settings are only available in Chinese, but they are not that complex. They have a messed up perception of what's considered a half-width character, so I had to manually edit that in the config file.

 

Has anyone else used it? Is there an even better alternative?

[hedwards]

You might look at SCIM, but I'm not sure how that would work or traditional characters, I only use simplified ones.

[Koxinga]

This thread is supposed to be about typing traditional characters using pinyin. Typing simplified characters works well enough using the default pinyin IME. However, the point of my post is to say that using rime instead of the default pinyin IME is much better for people who prefer typing traditional characters with pinyin.

 

Anyway, in many Linux distros SCIM was replaced by the more advanced iBus engine a few years ago. Some distros prefer fcitx engine, which is supposed to be even better, but I haven't tried that yet.