KDE devs have been quietly working on Plasma Keyboard, a new on-screen keyboard for desktop and mobile part of the “We Care About Your Input” KDE Goals initiative. Although not ready for texting yet, it has been making progress. Hopefully it’ll be in a screen near you soon. Join the effort!
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-keyboard
Will it work well with existed IME like Fcitx5? Or I can choose only one of them?
I see Qt Virtual Keyboard has their own InputMethod implementations, but I think it’s not a good idea to re-invent a new IME when there is no obvious advantage, because InputMethod is not a simple thing in some languages like Chinese and Japanese.
For example, libime, the core algorithm library of fcitx5-chinese-addons uses 47k SLOC to implement a good pinyin input method algorithm, even not count the Trigram language model, which is around 30MiB.
As a comparison, the pinyin algorithm of Qt Virtual Keyboard (it seems come from deprecated AOSP’s PinyinIME) uses only 8k SLOC. And PinyinIME was give up by AOSP since 2014, it never updates since that time (and no algorithm update since 2009). At 2018, Qt pull it into Qt Virtual Keyboard and never do actual algorithm optimization. So it has fallen away from the time.