Install Japanese keyboard layout in Linux/Cinnamon

A guide on how to install the Japanese keyboard layout in Linux

Photo by Marco Zuppone on Unsplash

I have been learning Japanese for a while now. So, I wanted to install it on my devices. Immersion, you see. Installing it in my phone was a breeze. Yet, I hit a wall when attempting to do it on Linux.

In this guide, I cover how to install Japanese on your Linux machine. This guide is for Cinnamon. Although, it should work on other DEs, I haven’t tested it.

You can add the Japanese keyboard layout in the Keyboard options.

This is useless unless you have a specific keyboard for that. We need software to transform Latin characters to kana and kanji. In Linux, we have two options.

1. IBus
2. Fcitx

I prefer Fcitx because IBus has some compatibility issues with Cinnamon’s shortcuts.

If you have ibus installed, you need to remove it. It will conflict with Fcitx. Remove it with:

sudo apt remove ibus ibus-mozc mozc-utils-gui fonts-noto-cjk

Install all fctix dependencies with

sudo apt install fcitx5 fcitx5-mozc fcitx5-frontend-gtk3

Logout and back in.

Configure Fcitx

Open Fcitx.

The following applet will appear:

Congrats, you successfully installed Fcitx. Right-click on the icon and click on “Configure”. That will open the Fcitx configuration menu.

At the available input methods search for Japanese, and select Mozc from the options.

At this point, we have our sexy layout ready to go. おめでとう (congrats).

Shortcuts

One problem remains. If you try Super + Space to change the layout, it won’t work. You need to disable Cinnamon’s default shortcut for that.

Open the keyboard configuration. In there, go to layouts.

Click on “Options”.

Click on “Switching to another layout”.

You will see several possible shortcuts there. Scroll to the bottom and deselect Win + Space. If you log out and in at this point, you’ll notice that Fcitx is not active. We need to set it as the default input method.

Default input method

Type the command im-config. You will see several menus, answer yes or ok, until you see this one.

Select Fcitx 5.

To confirm the input method, you can type im-config -l. The following will appear.

Now log out and in (again). And you’ll see that Fcitx is there.

Optional: Fcitx internal shortcuts

When you first start using Fcitx, you’ll notice that Super + Space doesn’t change layouts; it changes groups. I am not interested in that functionality. If you like it, skip this section.

Let’s edit those shortcuts.

Open your OS’s menu and write “Fcitx configurations”. Once there, click on “Global Options”.

There, you can configure the shortcuts to your liking. For example, I did the following:

Notice that I use Super + Space to change layouts instead of groups. The classic.

Taken from Madagascar, the movie

Conclusions

We went over how to:

• Install Fcitx.
• Configure inputs methods to default to Fcitx.
• Configure Fcitix’s shortcuts.

Now we can type kana and kanji with our Latin keyboard.

Have a good day!