The logo for SCIM

The Smart Common Input Method platform (SCIM), is an input method platform supporting more than thirty languages (CJK and many European languages) for POSIX-style operating systems including Linux and BSD. Image File history File links Scim_logo. ... An input method editor (IME) is a program or operating system component that allows computer users to enter complex characters and symbols (such as Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan and Korean characters), using a standard Western keyboard. ... CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which comprise the main East Asian languages. ... Most of the many indigenous languages of Europe belong to the Indo-European language family. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... An operating system is a special computer program that manages the relationship between application software, the wide variety of hardware that makes up a computer system, and the user of the system. ... Tux the penguin, based on an image created by Larry Ewing in 1996, is the logo and mascot of Linux. ... BSD redirects here; for other uses see BSD (disambiguation). ...

SCIM is a development platform to make Input Method (IM) developer life easier. It honors a very clear architecture and provides a pretty simple and powerful programming interface.

SCIM is a common IM platform written in C++. It abstracts the input method interface into several classes and tries to make these classes as simple and independent as possible. With such simple interfaces, developers can easily write their own input method in a few lines code. C++ (generally pronounced see plus plus) is a general-purpose programming language. ... In object-oriented programming, classes are used to group related variables and functions. ...

SCIM is highly modularized: most components can be implemented as dynamically loadable modules, thus can be loaded at runtime as you wish. For example, input methods written for SCIM could be IMEngine modules, and users can use such IMEngine modules combined with different interface modules (FrontEnd) in different environment without rewrite/recompile the IMEngine modules. In computer science, run time (with a space, though often its spelled without one) describes the operation of a computer program, the duration of its execution, from beginning to termination (compare compile time). ...

SCIM is a higher level library comparing with XIM or IIIMF, but has much simpler interface. And it can work with XIM or even IIIMF. SCIM can also support client specific input method interface, like gtk2 immodule and qt immodule.

Key features of SCIM:

• Fully Object Oriented structure written in C++.
• Highly modularized.
• Very flexible architecture, can be used as a dynamically loaded library as well as a C/S input method environment.
• Simple programming interface.
• Fully i18n support with UCS-4/UTF-8 encoding.
• Include many handy utility functions to speedup the development.
• GUI Panel with very rich features.
• Unified configuration framework.

Goals of SCIM:

• Act as an unified frontend for current available input method libraries. Currently bindings to uim and m17n library are available.
• Act as a language engine of IIIMF input method framework.
• Provide as many native IMEngines as possible.
• Support as many input method protocol/interface as possible.
• Support as many operating systems as possible.

Reference

SCIM's homepage

SCIM project at sourceforge.net