Fcitx 5 first release is in 2020/11/2, and as of today, we have reached the 13th release of Fcitx 5.
What happened to Fcitx 5 within this whole year of development?
1. Best Wayland support on Linux
As of today, to my knowledge, Fcitx 5 is the only input method frameworks under Linux that works under all different types of wayland.
We have been testing KDE/GNOME/Sway (Only causally played with wayfire and since there are too many wlroots based around we can’t do much test there.).
2. New engines
By the end of year we have two new engines https://keyman.com/ and https://github.com/OpenBangla/OpenBangla-Keyboard .
3. Flatpak support
Not only flatpak support fcitx5, but fcitx5 also works as a flatpak package.
https://fcitx-im.org/wiki/Install_Fcitx_5#Install_Fcitx_5_from_Flatpak
4. New features comparing to Fcitx 4 counterparts.
We really got tons of them new features, e.g.
- fully customizable shuangpin profile (you can define shuangpin profile with any combinitions of initial/final
- new preedit mode that takes less space in input window
- punctuation configuration via GUI
- quick match for long word in Pinyin
- paritial shuangpin support
- rime plugin loading
- rime new preedit mode
- rime dbus API
- rime app_options
- …
5. Android support
I didn’t develop this, only provides some Q/A on the details, and add some support to make it build/work on android more easily. https://github.com/rocka/fcitx5-android-poc/ It’s still considered as highly experimental, please use it with caution. One of our next target is to come up with a new API for implementing virtual keyboard, which will also benefit the native linux on screen keyboard.
If you are still using Fcitx 4, please consider give Fcitx 5 a try. You can find the distribution that packages fcitx5 via https://pkgs.org/search/?q=fcitx5 .
Congrats!