McBopomofo

About

McBopomofo (小麥注音) is a lightweight Chinese input method built for Mac users. It supports several keyboard layouts, including Standard, Eten (倚天), Hsu (許氏), Eten 26, IBM, and Hanyu Pinyin. The program is described as fast to respond, and its built-in dictionary is said to be reasonably accurate for typing Mandarin. Users can add or remove words from the dictionary. Typing a symbol is done by pressing the ` key, which opens a simple symbol table.

Installing McBopomofo requires macOS 13 Ventura or later. You unzip the downloaded archive and run the installer. If McBopomofo is already installed, the installer replaces the existing input method. Uninstallation instructions are in the user manual under "Removing the McBopomofo input method." The project is released under the MIT License, which permits free use and redistribution as long as the copyright notice and license are kept intact.

The current release is version 3.1.1, dated 2026-09-02, and its summary mentions a substantially revised dictionary, punctuation input improvements, and multilingual text conversion. Versions for Linux (fcitx5-mcbopomofo) and Chrome OS, as well as a web version, are also available. The source code is on GitHub, and dictionary issues can be reported there or through the project's Mastodon account.