Two Japanese IME questions for Anki 25.07.2 (3adcf05c) and later

Anki Help
1

Hello.

These are my questions, which also serve as the tl;dr:

  1. Do you have a Japanese input method that’s working reliably for Anki 25.07.2 (3adcf05c) or later from GitHub (not AUR or package managers) on any Linux distro? If so, what IME and distro?
  2. Did you have to fix anything? If so, what did you fix?

I didn’t structure the text below the best that I could, and that’s mostly because I only care about what I asked above. Think of my text below as an explanation for why I’m even asking.

My primary study topic is Japanese. For about 50% of the vocab cards I’m reviewing, I need to type kana in order to review at a decent pace. I also need to type kanji and kana at every stage while introducing new cards, mostly while editing them and searching against existing notes. This continues for the early stages of new cards as I improve my hints.

I was able to type Japanese just fine using fcitx5 with Anki 25.02. I was also able to use standard hotkeys, like 3 for “good”, without having to swap away from hiragana mode (distinction: romaji input for hiragana, not pure hiragana input). I updated my Arch Linux desktop and upgraded to Anki 25.07.2 from GitHub (I only use the direct downloads, no AUR). I could still type Japanese, just not in Anki (example locations that don’t work reliably: typed answer, browser window). I used the internal tool to downgrade back to 25.02. It didn’t change the situation. Running sudo /usr/local/share/anki/uninstall.sh and going back to the previous version that I had saved from GitHub doesn’t fix it. I haven’t tried rm’ing .local/share/Anki2/ or .local/share/AnkiProgramFiles/.

This is just to show that I have qt covered for fcitx5:

$ pacman -Ss fcitx5 | grep installed
extra/fcitx5 5.1.14-1 (fcitx5-im) [installed]
extra/fcitx5-anthy 5.1.7-1 [installed]
extra/fcitx5-configtool 5.1.9-1 (fcitx5-im) [installed]
extra/fcitx5-gtk 5.1.4-1 (fcitx5-im) [installed]
extra/fcitx5-qt 5.1.10-1 (fcitx5-im) [installed]

I also have Arch’s qt5 and qt6 package groups installed.

I tried swapping between these:

  • Sway
  • Hyprland
  • dwm
  • qtile
  • cinnamon
  • xfce4

I tried getting ibus to work instead, but I’m not sure I did everything needed.

I tried using fcitx instead of fcitx5. I remembered to grab the qt packages while doing so.

I also went through the typical fight involving IME variables (example instruction page: link). For example, modifying, unsetting, assigning as empty, manually setting while launching Anki, and changing where these are used:

GLFW_IM_MODULE=fcitx
GTK_IM_MODULE=fcitx
QT_IM_MODULE=fcitx
#QT_IM_MODULES="wayland;fcitx;ibus"
XMODIFIERS=@im=fcitx

I also went through the motions involving variables for ibus.

I usually can’t even swap keyboard layouts unless the text field I’m using is the only type of text field that I’ve focused for the session!

I thought maybe it was a problem generated by the Arch Linux update. I have an Arch Linux laptop set up mostly the same, except I had 25.02.6 on it. I upgraded Anki to 25.07.2 without running an Arch Linux update. The same problem occurred. I could type Japanese, but not if I was using Anki. But this time, I didn’t bother to use the internal tool to downgrade and instead went straight to the uninstall. I then installed the previous version I had saved, which allowed me to type Japanese. This still doesn’t prove much to me because I don’t know what files, missing or not, would cause that.

I pulled out a laptop I’ve been treating as dead and installed Linux Mint with xfce on it. That makes it an attempt via the Debian / “just works” route. I got fcitx5 working. I also got a fresh Anki-from-GitHub install working and never modified it beyond that. But I still couldn’t use fcitx5 with Anki 25.07.2.

I remembered to disable addons, including anki-launcher, for my desktop while writing this. That didn’t fix it.

I searched via Google, reddit, and these forums, but I found nothing that ended the problem for me.

Secondary issue: when fcitx5 unreliably works, Anki won’t let me just stay in hiragana mode to hit 1, 2, 3, 4, b, d, o, and so on. For example, it requires that I swap each time that I score my answer:

  1. Type kana and submit with enter
  2. Swap layouts
  3. Score my answer
  4. Swap layouts
  5. Repeat

It wasn’t this way before.

There are things I’ve forgotten to include. There are also things I haven’t tried. But what I want more than an answer to this problem with my specific setup is the ability to type Japanese during my reviews so that I can move on.

I’ve spent enough of my free time on this. I just want to get back to my reviews like in the good times last month. I’ve already been getting very behind due to other things. If there’s a solution that requires it, I’ll even wipe my study laptop and install something ugly (but not Windows)!

2

IBUS/mozc input works out of the box for me on Ubuntu 24.04. Fcitx may not work out of the box anymore, as the PyPI versions of Qt don’t ship with an fcitx module IIRC.

1 Like
3

I’ll try this next. I’ll also look into what that latter part means. Thank you!

4

I’m just letting you know that ibus+mozc worked in linuxmint+xfce! I’ll still look into what you meant about the module later, but now I can get caught up, which is the most important thing!

For anyone after me trying this on linuxmint, you won’t have GUI access to the settings until you install the mozc-utils-gui package. Run sudo apt install mozc-utils-gui to install it.

5

I guess that means you could still compile your own Anki build with Qt in a way so that fcitx works. Or somebody else could create compatible packages. Just the particular Anki build that you get through using the launcher downloaded from GitHub will use Qt from PyPI and not from your Arch installation.

6

Can a fcitx module not be included after the fact by Anki? I hope there will be a real solution for this because switching to Ibus is not that.