I noticed when I try to setup a regular Chinese keyboard (pinyin) in KDE it requires a lot of extra configuration. By default it does not actually output characters, it only outputs regular latin letters. In Gnome it outputs Chinese characters by default. It would be amazing if the KDE devs could develop native Chinese keyboard support into KDE. I have not looked into other languages but I am guessing Japanese does not work either and requires extra configuration
Maybe you should talk to the folks of the “We care about your Input” project. They are trying to solve these kinds of issues. Do you have anything planned for this @jpetso?
Right now there is some work happening on plasma-keyboard, the new on-screen keyboard, which would also benefit Chinese language users. @DMD is asking about support for physical keyboards here, assuming I’m not reading it wrong, and on that front we don’t currently have work actively going on.
The general consensus is that a number of capable input method frameworks exist already (notably fcitx5 and ibus) which we want to use in Plasma, as opposed to developing a new and probably inferior alternative. Currently we leave it up to distributions to install either of these by default. Where Plasma struggles right now is on the integration side:
- IBus is GNOME/GTK-focused, and does not provide a configuration page within Plasma’s System Settings.
- fcitx5 is friendly toward KDE and provides a configuration page. However, it will completely take over from Plasma’s own keyboard settings and show a helpful yet annoying popup notification on login. This prevents more distributions from installing it by default.
- The maintainer of fcitx5 has proposed a way forward for better integration between Plasma and fcitx5, which we would like to implement sometime. This would (hopefully) make it possible for Plasma to offer input method support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. by default.
At the moment, nobody is working on implementing this proposal. If I can finish my current gesture support project and a few other important tasks, I’d be interested to take a shot at it sometime. Or perhaps we’ll find an interested student to take it on as part of Season of KDE early next year. Or perhaps an amazing new contributor will show up and deem this important enough to work on.
Either way, we have a plan forward but are currently short on developer time to push this forward. Hopefully the community can hold out a little longer and until then, figure out how to install and set up their favorite input method with guidance from their distro or other users.
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