Zhongkey: An On-Screen Chinese PinYin Keyboard

As you might know, I'm taking an online Mandarin Chinese course, so I frequently have to type PinYin (Latin letters with various accent marks on top, plus the U with diaeresis). The on-screen keyboard provided by the web app has some issues. Specifically, it always places the inserted character at the end of the text field plus a line break (?!), it requires me to use the mouse to focus the text field again after inserting a special character, it can't be moved outside the web app workspace, and it's missing some of the more unusual combinations (e.g. capitals with accents or U with diaeresis and accent). After a while, I got tired of it.

So I made a better one.

Written quickly in .NET, Zhongkey is a simple PinYin keyboard that also has keys for Spanish (I had extra space in the key grid). It makes sure focus stays on your text field instead of taking it when you click a key in the grid. It also always puts the character where your insertion point was.

Download Zhongkey

Press the Capitals button to change the characters to, well, the capitalized version. (It becomes Lowercase as well.) If you want to remove its stay-on-topness without closing it, press Demote. (That becomes Promote, which restores its topmostness.) The Focus button just makes it steal focus so you can drag it around on old systems. (If you turn down the Windows graphics settings, dragging non-focused windows looks weird.) Obviously, press the lettered buttons to insert that character.

Zhongkey requires .NET 4.5 and is a portable (no install necessary, no elevation necessary) app.

Enjoy!