Ibus-pinyin seems not a good Chinese inputting system for Chinese learners. How do you usually input Chinese using keyboard without android or iphone?

Question

Since my reputation points are insufficient, I guess that I can't paste an image in this post. So I describe what I want to tell you using texts only.

I've been using ibus-pinyin in Ubuntu 22.04 to type Chinese letters in computer using keyboard.

The problem of this inputting system is that this system seems not supporting inputting Chinese letters using tones of pinyin.

For instance, as I want to input 十, firstly I have to type shi, then, a list of letters appears and I cannot find 十 from it, so I press tab to see a new list of letters, and I find 十 with tagged number, and finally I am able to type 十 hitting a tagged number(which is not always corresponding to a tone).

The problem of this inputting system is that I have no chance to memorize tones above letters of Chinese words using ibus-pinyin.

How do you usually type Chinese using keyboard with laptop or desktop computer?

Or can I still do what I want to do using ibus-pinyin?

Answer 1

The only thing that I know of is the 地球拼音 from rime https://rime.im/. (I googled and found some unheard names, but they’re so little used and not trustworthy)

You can use the ibus-rime engine. Rime is an input schema engine. When you install it you’ll have 地球拼音 by default, together with some other schemas. You can also explore tons of different Chinese input schemas. https://github.com/ayaka14732/awesome-rime

I cannot post an image either, so please see the screenshot at this post from the author of 地球拼音. https://byvoid.com/zhs/blog/recommend-rime/

The picture uses traditional characters as default, but you can easily change it to simplified characters by default. It’s highly customizable, so practically you can do whatever you want.

Chinese mainlanders predominantly use sogou, but tones are not input. Young scholars in the Chinese language usually use rime since there are schemas that support huge character set, historical phonology and other dialects, but requires some computer proficiency to customize it.