Fcitx

FCITX (Free Chinese Input Toy of X) is a collection of Simplified Chinese input methods for Linux.

Installation

Template:Package Official can be installed with Pacman from the [extra] repository.

Using FCITX to input Chinese

Before you can make use of FCITX for input, you have to setup some environment variables. It is quite simple.

• Open the Template:Filename file in your home directory and add following lines:

 #setup XIM environment, need not if use SCIM as gtk-immodules
 export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
 export QT_IM_MODULE=xim
 export XMODIFIERS="@im=fcitx"

• Re-login to make such environment effective.

After you re-login, open your favorite terminal, type:

  fcitx &

To see if fcitx is working correctly, open an application such as leafpad and press CTRL+Space to invoke FCITX and input some words.

If everything goes well, you may want to start FCITX automatically whenever you start X.

Open the Template:Filename file (see xinitrc) in your home directory, add line before starting your WM:

 killall fcitx
 fcitx &

That is it.

If you use any type of XDM (gdm for example), you should set up such environment in Template:Filename instead of above two files.

Enjoy!

Fcixt with KDM

To have FCITX start automatically with KDM, add the following lines to Template:Filename

 LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8
 export LANG
 LC_CTYPE=zh_CN.UTF-8
 export LC_CTYPE
 export XMODIFIERS="@im=fcitx"
 #pkill fcitx
 fcitx&

Add following lines to Template:Filename

 export XIM=fcitx
 export XIM_PROGRAM=fcitx
 export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim
 export QT_IM_MODULE=xim
 export XMODIFIERS="@im=fcitx"

Troubleshooting

CTRL+Space does not work

If you cannot invoke FCITX by pressing the CTRL+Space keyboard combination, but FCITX runs in background without problem, please check your locale:

 [ganlu@A ~]$ locale
 LANG=en_US
 LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8
 LC_NUMERIC="en_US"
 LC_TIME="en_US"
 LC_COLLATE=C
 LC_MONETARY="en_US"
 LC_MESSAGES="en_US"
 LC_PAPER="en_US"
 LC_NAME="en_US"
 LC_ADDRESS="en_US"
 LC_TELEPHONE="en_US"
 LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US"
 LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US"
 LC_ALL=

Above is what I get from command 'locale', so you can know for sure FCITX does support utf8 (en_US.utf8 at least) locale without problem. If your locale output shows you having set up a utf8 locale correctly, then I suggest you check if your bash does support utf8 locale:

$ locale -a

to see if your current locale in there, if not, do not worry, make it yourself:

$ localedef -vci en_US -f utf8 en_US.utf8

then, relogin to see if that works. If terrible things continue, I have to suggest you try any locale with "zh_CN", for example:

 export LC_CTYPE=zh_CN.GBK

For more information about locale, please find it in Google.

Note: You do not need to change your locale (such as LC_CTYPE) to a Chinese locale, ie: zh_CN.GBK, if you edit Template:Filename, and change this line:

 "xim" "X Input Method" "gtk20" "/usr/share/locale" "ko:ja:th:zh"

to:

 "xim" "X Input Method" "gtk20" "/usr/share/locale" "en:ko:ja:th:zh"

Very easy.

Characters are displayed as blank boxes

If you can trigger FCITX but the characters on it are displayed as blank boxes, open Template:Filename and change the line:

显示字体(中)=*

to

显示字体(中)=AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni

I am using uming font here, so be sure you have installed Template:Package Official. Restart FCITX:

$ pkill fcitx
$ fcitx &

If you have no config file after setup 3.6.3, you could generate it by:

fcitx -c

All configuration of FCITX can be found in Template:Filename, however you had better understand Chinese. :- )