User Experience: Summary of Ubuntu Chinese Pinyin Input Method

I have discussed some Pinyin input methods over the past two days. I would like to make a small summary and welcome to discuss them. At present, the default input platform for Ubuntu is ibus, and ibus-pinyin is released with the CD. The default five-stroke input method is ibus-table-wubi, and the default input method for traditional Chinese is ibus-chewing.

I only use Pinyin, five strokes, and cool audios. Below I will briefly summarize some of the common input methods I know, and let's see which one you think will be better for Ubuntu by default.

1. IBus

The ibus platform is currently standard for various major production editions. The framework itself is written in C ++, which is highly modularized and has many optional input methods. The author continues development and is enthusiastic about developers of input methods.

Ibus-pinyin is written in python and is less efficient. Some CPU 100% and Memory leakage bugs have also occurred. Ibus-sunpinyin can also be used for ibus pinyin, but there are fewer users and less feedback.

Ibus uses the gtk immodule, which makes it very good in the GTK program. It can input Chinese Characters in flash, but it performs normally in the QT program. It can be said that it is mainly the input platform of GTK.

2. Fcitx

Fcitx is an old Linux Chinese Input Method and has some fans. However, many people are still impressed by it based on the 3.x GBK Chinese configuration file. The new fcitx 4 uses the English utf8 configuration file, supports Custom Skin and code table, improves the input method interface, and adds a graphical Configuration tool. There are no more bugs than ibus.

The best pinyin solution for fcitx is fcitx-sunpinyin. The word accuracy is the same as that of all sunpinyin cores. Compared with ibus-sunpinyin and scim-sunpinyin, the advantage of fcitx is that it can take advantage of various functions (such as skin) of fcitx, and there is no difference between fluency and fcitx built-in Pinyin input methods.

Fcitx has the following problems: 1. the built-in pinyin input method has not become a module independently, and its algorithms are also lagging behind. 2. although the fcitx write input method is simpler than ibus, there is still a lack of attention, and the available input method is less than ibus.

Fcitx uses XIM, which is closer to an X Input platform. However, flash does not support XIM, and some cursor follows are also a little faulty. In version 4.1, gtk immodule is supported. The above problems will be solved together.

3. Scim

The scim platform was used as a standard for various releases. The input fluency of scim-pinyin is always better than that of ibus-pinyin. I believe some people still stick to the position of scim. However, no one is maintaining scim and its skim on kde, and Debian/Ubuntu is just a few simple bugs that the package staff occasionally fix. It is impossible for us to go back and use it again.

Scim pinyin input methods include scim-pinyin, scim-python and scim-googlepinyin. Currently, no one maintains them. The intelligent pinyin input method used to promote scim-pinyin is the reason why the author developed SCIM. scim-python is the predecessor of ibus-pinyin, and scim-googlepinyin is written by the algorithm used to input scim-pinyin android.

4. Yong

Yong is a relatively high-profile input method recently. The author said it was developed to promote his permanent code. I have never used it. I guess it uses XIM like fcitx from the configuration file, so it will be affected by various problems of XIM. Yong is a closed-source software. It cannot be used as the default input method by mainstream distributions for license reasons or platform portability reasons. Of course, it is always a good thing to give users another choice.