Chewing (Input Method)


The Chewing input method is an intelligent Zhuyin input method. It is one of the most popular input methods among Traditional Chinese Unix users.
Chewing was a project established by Lu-Chuan Kung and , sponsored by from Academia Sinica.
Their research result was published under the GPL.
The Chewing core team extended their work and actively maintains the project.

Motivation

Chewing was inspired by other proprietary intelligent Zhuyin input methods under Microsoft Windows, namely, Wang-Xin by Eten, Microsoft New Zhuyin, and Nature Zhuyin.
Since Zhuyin-based input methods are the most popular among computer users who read and write Traditional Chinese, an intelligent Zhuyin method is a necessity for Unix-like systems in order to attract more users. There was a similar input method, bimsphone, which was bundled in XCIN. However, it does not have a convenient API for further development.
The original chewing is no longer maintained, only works with XIM, and doesn't have a generic API for input frameworks. Jim Huang, et al. formed the Chewing core team and extended Gong and Chen's work. Thus the chewing core team renamed the project as "new" chewing to differentiate their work from the original. Nevertheless, the English name has remained "chewing".

Goals

Chewing has been adopted by various input frameworks in Unix-like systems.
On these systems, the chewing package is usually split into two parts:
libchewing, which handles the actual character selection logic; and
input framework interface for display and preference setting.
For examples:
There are also chewing input method for Windows and Mac OS.