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Don’t use…

Do use:

RIME

It supports basically everything you want, including proper traditional chinese punctuation and filtering pinyin by tones.

Installing RIME

latest release on Github

The installer & options are unfortunately only in chinese at the time of this writing (although that should change soon). You can use google lens / google translate’s camera feature for now. Once installed it has probably the best IME you can get.

Customizing RIME

If you right click the tray icon and select the option with (S), it opens the settings. The first page is a list of supported layouts. Press to go to the next page, where you can change the theme. Press a final time to save the settings.

If you need to edit files manually, you can find the files for RIME at C:/Program Files (x86)/RIME/Weasel/ on Windows.

The .schema.yaml files are the ones that define a layout. With a text editor you can change a few things (such as disabling the shift button from enabling alphabet mode, forcing ROC standard characters rather than variant characters used over in Singapore or mainland China (為 instead of 爲 etc.), and more.

Using Terra Pinyin (地球拼音) in RIME

If you want to be able to type not just hao and get a whole list of Hanzi, but be able to specify which hao you want (for example, hao4 which among others would give you ), you will want to use Terra Pinyin. It’s like normal pinyin you already know, supports typing just the first letter and have it suggest the correct sentence (for example: jttqhh might suggest 今天天氣很好), but it also let’s you enter tones.

By default, the tones are entered as follows:

Using Terra Pinyin with simplified chinese characters