你好! Cantonese input on Linux

Writing chinese with the jyutping system (cantonese pinyin) on Linux (Mint 21.2 at the time of writing) was not as straight forward as I thought.

If you want to be able to write canto anywhere in the system (I mean, outside the very efficient Chromium + Google Inputs tools), here’s a TL;DR;

  • Use Ibus input system instead of Fcitx
  • The default jyutping database returns strange answers, proposing very rare characters first instead of usual ones : download an updated database source, compile it and replace system’s default file
# Required packages
sudo apt install ibus-table-jyutping

# Fetch updated database source from Samuel Cheng's website
wget https://www.samuelcheng.info/jyutping/jyutping.txt.zip
unzip jyutping.txt.zip

# Create database file
ibus-table-createdb -n jyutping.db -s jyutping.txt

# Overwrite distribution default file (Mint here, so Debian based)
sudo cp jyutping.db /usr/share/ibus-tables/tables/jyutping.db

Resources :