codema.in
Tue 9 Sep 2025 1:52PM

Add support for Chinese input

PP Pirate Praveen Public Seen by 6

Introduce and describe the topic

Currently neither squeekboard or stevia supports Chinese input.

Technical details is here https://gitlab.gnome.org/guidog/stevia/-/issues/74

Why is this important?

Leaving out Chinese input poses a big challenge to Chinese users.

How would you like people to respond?

The easiest solution may be to package kylin virtual keyboard in debian and add DBus interface expected by phosh to it. Another option would be to extend Stevia to use fcitx5 as a backend (like how it currently uses Varnam for Indian languages).

G

Guido Tue 9 Sep 2025 2:19PM

For Phosh upstream bringing in another OSK is not an option.

PP

Pirate Praveen Tue 9 Sep 2025 4:22PM

@Guido is adding ibus or fcitx5 backend to stevia acceptable in principle?

G

Guido Tue 9 Sep 2025 4:32PM

@Pirate Praveen yes, …or ibus or uim. You'll find numerous mentions of it if you skim through discussions around stevia/phosh-osk-stub online see e.g. https://gitlab.gnome.org/guidog/stevia/-/merge_requests/8

G

Guido Tue 9 Sep 2025 4:45PM

Just in case this isn't clear: UIM is an IM like ibus and fcitx so what you ask for has an MR in stevia already, I've added some more details to the issue on where I see the next challenges.

PP

Pirate Praveen Tue 9 Sep 2025 6:05PM

@Guido I'm learning Chinese so I could help with some basic testing. I mentioned ibus and fcitx5 since I have used both (ibus-pinyin on laptop and fcitx5 on waydroid). I will checkout uim.

G

Guido Tue 9 Sep 2025 6:13PM

I wouldn't bother with uim too much, both ibus and fcitx see more active development. UIM is mostly to demo that adding this isn't hard.

PP

Pirate Praveen Tue 9 Sep 2025 6:20PM

@Guido ok makes sense.