Japanese Keyboard on Linux

Since I used to consider myself an otaku, and also reside in the originating country of this language I need a Japanese keyboard, even though you might buy a japanese keyboard, believe me, it’s better (at least in Linux) to make do with a bit of software emulation.

Preamble

Credit where credit is due, this video helped me a lot, luckily it was on Arch, other things such as Manjaro-GNOME specific centric things I figured them out on my own.

Instructions

In order to get everything going. On an arch fresh install you’d have to do the following:

• yay -S adobe-source-han-sans-jp-fonts
• yay -S adobe-source-han-serif-jp-fonts
• yay -S fcitx5-im fcitx5-configtool fcitx5-mozc
• Edit /etc/locale.gen, uncomment #ja_JP.UTF-8 UTF-8
• Save the file
• Regenerate the locales with sudo locale-gen
• Configure something so that fcitx5 auto-starts, in our case this is part of the .zshrc file.
• We need to add environment variables so that fcitx5 starts and actually works a good way to set environment variables is in a ~/.zshenv file, in here we should set up as follows:

export GTK_IM_MODULE='fcitx'
export QT_IM_MODULE='fcitx'
export SDL_IM_MODULE='fcitx'
export XMODIFIERS='@im=fcitx'

• We need to add the Mozc keyboard as part of the layouts that our DE has registered. After doing so, we should be seeing a keyboard in the icon tray by pressing the Hotkey to switch between layouts we should be switching to Japanese (e.g. Ctrl + Space). — You will have to start fcitx5-configtool so that you can add the Mozc keyboard, also be sure to uncheck the Show only current language checkbox.
• GNOME might require for a specific addon to be installed so that it integrates with fcitx correctly, download it and install it. This basically will make it so that the window that pops up with the 変換 is aligned with the theme, (I love dark themes, so the window will also be dark and stylized).

Since (as of today), Wayland is the new standard for the latest versions of GNOME, we have to work with fcitx5, this is the new standard that integrates seamlessly.

mini note: You can even customize the theme of fcitx perhaps I will dabble in that in the future? (time will tell)

KDE Plasma

(Stayed until late for this one). I was trying out this config in a virtual machine to see if it is actually idempotent, but there’s this really specific bug on KDE Plasma.

Nothing will work unless you remove the default (US) keyboard. Save, re-add US-Keyboard and then add Mozc. After this it started working on KDE Plasma as well. (Just fyi, KDE Plasma also uses Wayland by default).

Source

Extra Note: For whatever reason fcitx5-configtool will open up Plasma’s own Settings window, so you can just add Mozc there.

About Wayland, what is it?

Before going into details, let’s define something:

Display Protocol: This is a middleman between applications and the screen/keyboard /mouse. Apps don’t talk directly to the screen, they talk to this intermediate layer.

There are currently (in Linux distros) two protocols:

X11: This is a display protocol that used to be a standard since the mid-80s, it had a strategy of intercepting all signals in its X server which then talked to the hardware.

Wayland: This is another iteration of a display protocol but that started pretty recently (2008), it was intended as a replacement for X11. Its strategy is different since it enables apps to talk more directly to the compositor, which is the program that draws things on the screen (GNOME Shell, KDE’s KWin).

Because X11 was the standard for so long, many apps don’t support the newer approach, but Wayland is being pushed heavily by all the Linux community. There’s even solutions that sort of translate things X11 apps to Wayland, a sort of compatibility layer.

This can affect sometimes the solutions, errors and other things we configure on our linux distro so we should be aware of this concepts to debug and lookup info more accurately.

GNOME Shenanigans

In order to keep my environment consistent, since I use a custom keyboard (Keychron K2 HE btw), layout is differently, and I am switching between windows and Linux. Muscle memory plays a big role when it comes to speed and consistency with the things I write (since I’m a coder). And so, one specific thing to fcxit and its input source switching is that it’s mapped by default to Ctrl + Space, however, on Windows that key is Super (Win) + Space. Since in Linux you can do whatever you want, I’d rather adapt that into Windows shortcuts than the other way around and train my brain again.

And so, you can customize the hotkey for that pretty easily by going into the Settings section of fcxit. However, GNOME has something already mapped to Super + Space. So you need to:

. Go into the settings in Gnome, Keyboard > Hotkeys . Search for Switch to next input source. . Unassign the keymap here . Go into fcxit, change the input change to Super + Space

And with this, the input source change should be transferrable across OS.

Extra Note: The reason I ran into this small rabbit hole is because Ctrl + Space messes up my workflow when coding, since that is used for IDE autocomplete suggestions, and in Linux I kept changing the input source between Japanese and English, and so because Linux is king, I decided to go and make the experience whatever I wanted and intended on sticking with.

Old laptops and fcitx

So, I have a really old laptop, that thanks to the power of Linux is still usable, (mostly light work, Japanese study, really low-end gaming). Maybe because it only has 8 GB RAM, processor is just not there when it comes to actual power (also I think I got scammed a bit with the laptop). There’s one really specific and nieche issue. And that is while simply typing Japanese and switching fast, sometimes the keyboard dies, it doesn’t recognize the keys, or it appears as though the Shift key is always pressed.

If you surf the internet, there are tons of possible solutions, workarounds, and so on, but nothing really worked. (And this is where ChatGPT became goated). Out of conversations and suggestions with him, I managed to isolate the issue:

It's fcitx that for whatever reason crashes/just derps out on this laptop.

And so, the way to hot-reload it is actually pretty interesting:

• Go to a TTY i.e., Ctrl + Alt + F3
• Log into the account
• ps aux | grep fcitx
• killall fcitx5
• fcitx5 -dr

This in essence kills the process and we then start it again. After doing this task, the keyboard behaviors stopped being strange. Cementing the idea that the culprit was indeed the IDE.