scim

fter decorating my Linux box with all newest GUI components, next things are for work. I found out that all Vietnamese keyboard softwares is broken on Hardy Heron: xvnkb stops kde_init and x-unikey crashes other applications all the time. Then come the wonderful thing scim. scim is a global input software designed for almost every languages. Mathematically speaking, the job is just mapping between one key-combination to a character-code. In this view, mostly any languages could be supported without any difficulties.

On every day works, I mostly use English, and Vietnamese, Chinese is just for entertainment. Please note that Chinese input is done via vi-nomtelex method, which bases on Hán-Việt (the Vietnamese phonetical transcribe of Chinese) to retrieve the correct Unicode character, thus we have a double mapping here: from raw keystrokes to Vietnamese and from Vietnamese (Hán-Việt) to the final characters. Actually, this method is designed primarily not for Chinese, but for Nôm, the ancient Vietnamese writing system.