"Configuring Chinese Input with fcitx in Xmonad WM"

Posted on September 22, 2020 by Cris

Early this year I started to learn Chinese but when I try to write some 汉字,just for fun,but I didn't have the right input method so I search for info, specifically for my Window Manager, that is Xmonad, I didn't find anything but there are some related posts, and there's also Archlinux Wikiso lets begin

As Archlinux Wiki says,there is two main options, fcitx and Ibus, I preferred to go for fcitx, that is a lightweight input method framework and provides support to many non-latin characters.

Some considerations

Currently I'm working with Archlinux

Linux kadel 5.8.10-arch1-1 #1 SMP HARDENED Thu, 17 Sep 2020 18:01:06 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux })

But it doesn't matter just for reference, because as you know we'll use pacman as package manager

First, We have to download some packages


#first we have to install fcitx and some related packages
sudo pacman -S fcitx fcitx-qt5 fcitx-googlepinyin fcitx-configtool

Reason for each package

  • fcitx: a lightweight input method that support non-latin characters
  • fcitx-qt5: Support for Qt5
  • fcitx-googlepinyin: Googlepinyin wrapper for fcitx
  • fcitx-configtool: An interface to configure fcitx
Adding Chinese Locales

Now we have to configure the environment, generating the locale variables for Chinese


$sudo pacman locale-gen zh-CN.UTF-8

Now we open the fcitx-configtool

We add the "google-pinyin" input method

Setting environment variables for fcitx

I'm currently using lightdm so i need to add the following lines to /etc/profile, ~/.profile,/etc/xprofile or ~/.xprofile.


/etc/profile

'''
GTK_IM_MODULE DEFAULT=fcitx
QT_IM_MODULE  DEFAULT=fcitx
XMODIFIERS    DEFAULT=\@im=fcitx
'''

Now, we need to re-login, as I configure before C-S-o to quit

Note

Now, if fcitx doesn't start at the beginning, you may need to add some lines, if you are using openbox, just add fcitx & to your autostart file, or if your are using Xmonad, you may add
myStartupHook =do
spawOnce "fcitx &"
 in you haskell.hs

For default to toggle between inputs, use Ctrl+Space, but it could be customized in fcitx-configtool