Files
fcitx5-m3ui/README.md
T
justmeandClaude Sonnet 5.5 0804634dc1 Add Material 3 candidate window addon for Fcitx5
Fork of the classicui addon (Fcitx5 5.1.23) with a Material 3 look, spring
based animations and a right click action menu for candidates.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-19 21:58:54 +08:00

3.9 KiB

fcitx5-m3ui

A Material 3 styled candidate window for Fcitx5, built as a user interface addon (m3ui) that replaces classicui.

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Features

  • Rounded Material 3 panel with light and dark themes that follow the system.
  • Spring based animations: the panel slides in with a small bounce and fades in, the highlight pill glides between candidates. Stiffness and damping are configurable.
  • Right click a candidate to open an action menu. It shows whatever actions the input method offers, for Pinyin that is Forget candidate, Pin to top as custom phrase and Delete from custom phrase.
  • Works on Wayland and X11 (Xwayland) input contexts, positioning and pointer handling are inherited from classicui.
  • Optional KWin helper that shortens KWin's own fade out for the candidate window only.

Status

Personal project, only tried on Fedora 44, KDE Plasma 6.7 on Wayland, NVIDIA GPU, Fcitx5 5.1.23 with the Pinyin engine. The build scripts have not been run on any other setup.

The addon is a fork of classicui and is built inside the Fcitx5 source tree, because Fcitx5's Wayland protocol wrappers are not installed by fcitx5-devel. The Fcitx5 source version used for the build must match the installed Fcitx5.

There is no fade out animation of its own: on Wayland the window is destroyed as soon as the panel has nothing to show.

Build

Needs the Fcitx5 development files and the dependencies of classicui (cairo, pango, librsvg, gdk-pixbuf, wayland-protocols, xcb libraries). On Fedora:

sudo dnf install fcitx5-devel extra-cmake-modules cairo-devel pango-devel \
    gdk-pixbuf2-devel librsvg2-devel wayland-protocols-devel \
    plasma-wayland-protocols-devel systemd-devel libuuid-devel fmt-devel \
    expat-devel iso-codes-devel json-devel xkeyboard-config-devel \
    xcb-util-devel xcb-util-keysyms-devel xcb-util-wm-devel \
    xcb-util-image-devel xcb-imdkit-devel libxkbfile-devel libxkbcommon-x11-devel

then

scripts/build.sh      # downloads Fcitx5 + yoga, overlays src/, builds m3ui
scripts/install.sh    # installs into ~/.local, nothing outside $HOME

build.sh picks the Fcitx5 version from pkg-config, override it with FCITX_VERSION.

Use

FCITX_ADDON_DIRS=$HOME/.local/m3ui/lib64/fcitx5:/usr/lib64/fcitx5 fcitx5 -r -u m3ui

FCITX_ADDON_DIRS is how Fcitx5 finds addons outside the system directory, it has to be set in the environment that starts Fcitx5 if you want this on every login. fcitx5 -r brings the stock interface back.

Settings live in ~/.config/fcitx5/conf/m3ui.conf, see config/m3ui.conf.example.

Key Default Meaning
Animations True Master switch for animations
Bounce True Off makes movement critically damped (no overshoot)
SpatialStiffness 2000 Spring stiffness for movement, higher is faster
SpatialDamping 62 Damping ratio in percent, lower bounces more
EffectsStiffness 3800 Spring stiffness for fading
SlideDistance 22 Slide in distance in px
SlideDirection 0 0 from left, 1 from right, 2 from below
Theme / DarkTheme m3ui-light / m3ui-dark Themes in themes/

Themes are classicui themes with extra keys in [InputPanel]: SurfaceColor, OutlineColor, HighlightFillColor, PanelRadius, ItemRadius. A transparent SurfaceColor falls back to the classic image based drawing, so classic themes still work (without animation).

KWin fade out (optional, KDE Plasma)

KWin's Fading Popups effect fades popups out over 600 ms and the candidate window counts as a popup. kwin/install-fadingpopups-override.sh copies the effect from your system into ~/.local/share/kwin-wayland/effects/ and patches the copy so only the window class fcitx fcitx is affected. The script fails if the upstream effect source no longer matches what it patches.

License

LGPL-2.1-or-later, see NOTICE.md.