matsuba is a lightweight Japanese IME for Linux. It comes with kana input, kanji conversion and completion as well as a utility cli.
matsuba is still very much so a young project so bugs and issues will be present. Please do not hesitate to leave an issue.
Features
Some notable features of matsuba are
- hiragana/katakana conversion
- kanji dictionary completion
- querying and mutate state using cli
- manually convert kana to kanji using cli
- modular and extensible popup completion menu
- written in rust
User Guide
This section is for end users of matsuba. It will cover installation, configuration and usage.
What is an IME?
An input method editor (IME) is a program that let's characters that you normally cannot. matsuba is an IME for Japanese. matsuba has two special keybindings call henkan (conversion mode) and muhenkan (no conversion mode). In henkan mode, all characters that you type will be converted into hiragana, and pressing the complete key will bring up a list of kanji that can be converted into. In muhenkan mode, your keyboard behaves like it originally does. This let's you quickly toggle between the two keyboards.
Installation
Linux Packages
matsuba is packaged for various linux distributions.
Arch Linux
Avaliable on the AUR with either the built version of the last stable release
yay -S matsuba-bin
or latest commit directly from git
yay -S matsuba-git
From Source
Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/MrPicklePinosaur/matsuba
Build the source:
cargo build --release
Usage
Starting matsud
matsud is the actual server that handles the heaving lifting. You can start it as a daemon by running
matsud &
Alternatively, you can use your init system to automatically manage matsud for you. For systemd users:
sudo systemctl enable matsuba
sudo systemctl start matsuba
Fetching Dictionary
matsuba first needs to fetch kanji lists from the EDICT/JMICT project for use in kanji completions. You can populate the matsuba database by running
matsucli fetch
You can also fine tune which kanji lists are populated via tags/filters. By default all tags are enabled. A full list can be found here. Just pass in which tags you wish to include (or not include) using the tag flag:
matsucli fetch --tag -baseb,-bot,+grmyth
In the above example, baseball words and botany words are not included, but greek myth words are.
matsucli
matsucli is a utility command line interface to interact with the main matsuba daemon, matsud. matsucli let's you query and modify the state of matsuba, such as enabling and disabling henkan mode, as well as converting kana. This is great for interacting with scripts.
Configuration
mastuba is configured with toml. The default configuration file is installed at /usr/share/matsuba/matsuba_default.toml. You can copy it and create per user changes:
cp /usr/share/matsuba/matsuba_default.toml ~/.config/matsuba/matsuba.toml
Currently the places matsuba looks for configuration files are (in increasing presedence):
/usr/share/matsuba/matsuba_default.toml~/.config/matsuba_.toml
Configuration Options
| key | purpose | default value |
|---|---|---|
| server.listen_address | port the gRPC server listens on | [::1]:10000 |
| keys.henkan | switch to henkan mode | C-comma |
| keys.muhenkan | switch to muhenkan mode | C-period |
| keys.accept | accept the currently selected conversion | Return |
| keys.delete | delete one character in conversion | BackSpace |
| keys.cancel | cancel the entire conversion | Escape |
| keys.next_conversion | cycle to the next conversion | Tab |
| keys.prev_conversion | cycle to the previous conversion | S-Tab |
| theme.bg | default background color | |
| theme.fg | default foreground color | |
| theme.selected_bg | background color of selected conversion | |
| theme.selected_fg | foreground color of selected conversion | |
| theme.completion_bg | background color of completion | |
| theme.completion_fg | foreground color of completion | |
| database.cache_dir | file directory that database files will be stored in | $HOME/.config/matsuba |
Developer Guide
matsuba encourages the creation of 3rd party completion renderers (the little box that pops up when you start typing).
An in-depth developer guide is coming soon...
Contributors
matsuba was developed by MrPicklePinosaur.