Episode: 3302
Title: HPR3302: Input Methods on Ubuntu
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3302/hpr3302.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 20:27:03

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 330242, the 30th of March 2021.
Today's show is entitled Input Methods on Ubuntu.
It is hosted by Clack and is about 15 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, I'm adding some input methods to a standard Ubuntu 20.04 install.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hi, I'm Clacket and I just bought a new computer.
This doesn't happen very often.
One of the things I have to do is to install some input methods because I'm a member of a
multilingual family and we need to be able to type some Chinese.
So because we don't do this very often, every time is a little bit different.
There's a new Ubuntu version, maybe there's a new input method framework and you have to
look everything up again on the internet and try things back and forth and see how everything fits
together this time. So I'm going to perfect a normal Ubuntu 20.04 focal false up and the default input method
is iBus these days. You can see this by going to settings, just press the super button or
Windows keys and search for region. Then you come to region and language, scroll down a bit and click
that and there's another key, manage installed languages and that's where you can see available
language support. If you click install remove languages there, you make sure to click Chinese
traditional in our case and then off you go to install some packages and on the same language support
dialog box there's also keyboard input method system and it says iBus and I want to keep it that way.
I want to customize as little as possible on my systems these days because I'm old and I don't
have time for this stuff. So if iBus is the default I'm going to make this work with iBus.
Okay so we installed the language support for Chinese. What does this mean? I'm back in the
region and language dialog and there's a list of input sources so i click plus and this is Chinese
great and there it just says Chinese again an on-you opinion old girl. I tried this before Chinese
just means okay it's just a normal keyboard I don't know how to type Chinese characters with this
so what we need to do here is to install some packages. Now you can use the software center
or I'm old school so I use the terminal and apt but if you go to Ubuntu software or you use apt
on the command line it's the same thing it's the same name of the packages. Everything is called iBus
something because that's the input method framework in use and my partner is a native Chinese
speaker and she wants a pinion for just typing Latin characters phonetically and then
get a list of characters that match that pronunciation and she also wants quick where
24 keys on the keyboard represent 24 different components of a Chinese character so you press two
of these and then you get a list of the characters that contain these two components.
I don't speak Mandarin and I want to use the youth ping input method which is phonetic
Cantonese so my my partner actually speaks Cantonese but she learned pinion phonetics so she speaks Mandarin
as well. I want youth ping so I want the packages iBus table youth ping let me see here what I
installed get selections grip iBus so I want iBus table youth ping so that iBus dash table dash
youth ping and if you know youth ping you know how to spell youth ping my partner wants iBus table
dash quick dash classic and there's a quick three and quick five as well but she doesn't know what
those are she always used a quick classic and there's also an iBus dash lib pinion so we install
these packages on the computer and now the potential is there to have these input methods
but then it's up to each user to add them to that user's configuration so I would log in as my
partner and I would add that's the region and language settings page input sources and I would click
plus and this is among other things Chinese so I click Chinese and now that I've installed stuff
there's Chinese quick classic in that menu so I click that and then I click add but there was no
pinion there and the funny thing is that now if you click plus and apart from the languages
there's also three dots at the bottom you click three dots you get a longer list of languages
and at the bottom of that is others you click other and then you get a very long list of languages
and in that list there's Chinese parentheses pinion or actually it says intelligent pinion
and that's what we want so then click Chinese intelligent pinion and add
so now my partner's account is all set up I log out from her account I log into my account
and I click plus and Chinese and among the Chinese there's Chinese youth ping so that I'm satisfied
but since I was doing all of this I started thinking oh yeah what about emoji so there's also
other input methods than for normal languages there's also there's one called iBastable
emoji but it turned out that was not what I want actually because that one only handles the classic
emoji like the combinations of Latin and punctuation and Japanese characters that look like
some face or some person throwing a table or those things and know what I want is the
graphical unicode emoji and those are available in something called
typing booster so then I would install the package iBastash typing dash booster
and in the input sources I would click plus three dots other
and then in other search for other again and then so this is another language because it's not
really a language it says other and in parenthesis typing booster once I've added that I can
click settings for it and enable oh yeah not not in this menu so what I would do is switch
to that input and how you switch is you use super and space so super is the windows key for
example if you have a windows keyboard and then until you end up at the other typing booster
which has the rocket icon and then in the notification area you get the the current language so it
would show EN for English it would show Z age for Chinese and in this case it shows the rocket
and if you click that rocket then you can see unicode symbols and emoji predictions among the
menu choices there and it's by default off but if you click on then you get access to all the
smiley faces and puking faces and whatever you might have you might wonder well if this is for
getting emoji why do you have to enable emoji but the point of this is actually originally to
help you type faster by allowing you to type normally but as you type it remembers words you've
written previously so it's a little bit like your on-screen keyboard in your mobile phone
instead you're accepted you are using your real keyboard but it's still suggesting completion so
you would start writing apostrophe and then you type APO and I suggest oh maybe you mean apostrophe
press one if you mean apostrophe so you get a list of things and you press one did it to choose
the completion you want or just keep typing normally if you if you're not satisfied with the
completions you get offered so what happens when you enable unicode emoji support is that you will
start typing like a smile and then it offers like maybe I can auto-complete this to the actual
graphical smile character so that's how that works and as a bonus I can also mention that
I'm a Swedish speaker and it's it's a long struggle to handle keyboards when you're buying them
nothing Sweden and you're trying to type Swedish characters not because it's difficult to imagine
other keys in the layout than are printed on the keys but because when you buy a US layout there's
one key to few so if you choose to have Swedish layout you cannot use it for programming because
you don't have smaller grater so that means you need to flip back and forth you don't have pipe either
so that means if you want to type something a Swedish you need to switch to Swedish layout and then
when you want to do some unixie stuff then you need to switch to US layout and this is very frustrating
but luckily there's a euro key layout that you can use
you do this by once again adding an input source in the region and language dialog
so you click plus and then you choose English United States and it turns out English United States
the language has like 20 or maybe even more different layouts and one layout is the euro key
EUR key so that's basically if you don't use any qualifiers like alt or shift or those keys then it's
just like the the characters typed on the the faces of your keycaps so it's just a normal US keyboard
but when you use the right alt key you get access to more stuff than you would have in the usual US layout
so in my case I'm interested in the O and EUR mostly so the A and EUR are A and O with umblouts
and I get them by just holding down alt right alt and pressing A or holding down right alt and pressing O
so how about the O let's near the A the O is an A with a ring over it and the way it's placed on
the euro key layout is I hold down alt gr the right alt and key and q and then I get the O
so now my new computer is also up for being useful for typing Swedish typing programming
characters typing Chinese and even typing emoji now just have one problem left that I haven't solved
and that's I'm using Ubuntu as I said but I don't get all my software from Ubuntu I also
install software using geeks which is a package system that you can install on the side of your
existing distribution geeks is available as a distribution of its own but you can also just
use the packages on your existing distribution and that's what I'm doing these packages for
example I'm using icecats to access the fediverse on the web the icecat browser is installed via geeks
and that means now that I have my fancy input methods installed and activated
when I type in the icecat window nothing special happens it's just the normal us layout
and I don't know how to fix this yet I've been talking to people on IRC and they didn't know either
they said oh I don't even use this on geeks I don't even know if it's supposed to work in geeks
itself I'm assuming it actually works in geeks the operating system but geeks the package manager
and Ubuntu the operating system don't seem to cooperate well on this so maybe I'll come back
in a later episode to sort this out so until then this has been hacker public radio
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