SmartIM is a plugin to make vim stand well with input methods. It switches the input method to English when leaving insert mode and switches back to Chinese when you enter insert mode again. It consists of 2 tiny programs:

• im-select: a command-line utility to get/set active input method
• smartim.vim: a vim plugin to do automatic input method switch, using im-select

It is Mac-only for now.

1. Add this line to your ~/.vimrc file: Plugin 'gooooloo/smartim'
2. Open vim and run :PluginInstall

1. cd ~/.vim/bundle
2. git clone [email protected]:gooooloo/smartim.git

1. Clone this repository to your local disk
2. Copy im-select and smartim.vim (both are under plugin directory) to your vim plugin directory (usually .vim/plugins)

Then, enjoy the convenience!

I design 3 modes to use this plugin:

By default it is fast mode.

I am having such mapping:

map <silent> <leader><leader>f :call Smartim_set_fast_mode()<CR>
map <silent> <leader><leader>e :call Smartim_set_english_mode()<CR>
map <silent> <leader><leader>c :call Smartim_set_chinese_mode()<CR>

I hard code 双拼 as Chinese Input for this plugin. Feel free to change them to to your own input method ID:

let g:smartim_english = '<your_english_keyboard_id>'

let g:smartim_chinese = '<your_chinese_keyboard_id>'

Because I found interaction with im-select is somehow slow. At most cases I don't need change the input method neither. That's when fast mode should be used.

Because the command-line utility im-select uses Mac specific APIs. It should be easy to develop equivalents for other platforms but I just don't have the time to do so.

Sure. The usage is very simple: invoke it with no argument to get the ID string of current active input method; invoke it with an ID string to set current input method.

$ im-select
com.apple.keylayout.US # print the ID string of your active input method
$ im-select com.apple.keylayout.US # change your active input method