So earlier I found out Fcitx doesn’t work under WPS on Linux. And there’s an issue about it on Jionglian’s tracker too: https://github.com/fcitx/fcitx5/issues/83 The solution everyone on the internet gives is to set: env QT4_IM_MODULE="fcitx5" and then launch WPS, after which the IME works. That did jack shit for me. And from what Jionglian has said in various places (GitHub, IRC, SNS), setting it to fcitx5 isn’t actually fixing anything — it fails to find a real “fcitx5” and falls back to xim, which is why it works. So why the hell are we setting “fcitx5” at all? Just set “xim” directly!

The great Weng-face finally shipped the stable release of Fcitx 5. He didn’t bother writing a proper release announcement — just sent a message to his own mailing list, so I’d guess most people have no idea this happened. Doesn’t matter! Fcitx 5 stable is out, and in the time it takes to jerk off once, it’s already at 5.0.2!

The great 囧脸 a.k.a. CSSlayer quietly pushed out a new fcitx release 12 days ago, version number 4.2.9.8. Bear in mind the last new release from 囧脸 was back in the winter of 2018. Probably busy with the New Year, poor guy — he even forgot to bump the version number that time. Sure, most of the noble Archer crowd have already moved to fcitx5, but for us backwards Ubuntu users a new fcitx4 release still means a lot. Aside from fixing a pile of typos and updating translation files for a pile of languages almost nobody recognizes, it also fixes a few small problems.

Today I found out Baidu Pinyin has a Linux version now. Holy shit.

Just a few days ago, my fcitx input method started crashing for no apparent reason. Basically, I’d start it up, type a few characters, and it would die. I dug through the logs and found the problem: it’s related to the fcitx-cloudpinyin module — the “cloud pinyin” thing.

There are a few ways to type kaomoji on Ubuntu. Let’s start with input methods — Fcitx’s “Jiong Lian” input method has a fairly unique approach to kaomoji. You can install a standalone table: sudo apt install fcitx-table-emoji

The work PC runs Ubuntu 12.04, and lately fcitx just wouldn’t come up. Ctrl+Space did nothing. But if I quit fcitx and started it once from a terminal, it worked fine for the rest of the session. After screwing around with it for half a day, the culprit turned out to be in .xinit.