Developer(s) Phạm Kim Long | Development status active | |
 | ||
Initial release 2000; 17 years ago (2000) Stable release 3.63 / 1 October 2005; 11 years ago (2005-10-01) Preview release 4.2 RC4 / 23 August 2014; 2 years ago (2014-08-23) Repository prdownloads.sourceforge.net/unikey/Uk362src.zip | ||
UniKey is an open-source Vietnamese input method editor for Microsoft Windows developed by Phạm Kim Long. As of 2014, it is the most popular input method editor for Vietnamese. The official Linux port of UniKey is known as X-UniKey.
Contents
Features
UniKey supports the three most common Vietnamese input methods: Telex, VNI, and VIQR. Due to the fragmented state of Vietnamese computing during the 1990s, UniKey supports as many as 14 Vietnamese character encodings, including TCVN3, VNI, Unicode, VIQR, VPS, VISCII, and Windows-1258.
History
Long began developing the software privately in 1994 as TVNBK, short for Tiếng Việt Nam Bách Khoa, after Hanoi University of Science and Technology (Trường Đại học Bách khoa Hà Nội), where he was studying. TVNBK was originally written in assembly language for DOS systems. In the mid-1990s, he ported it to Windows NT 4.0, renaming it LittleVnKey. In 2000, he released the software publicly for the first time as UniKey and placed it under the GNU General Public License. Recent versions of the software and its source code are hosted on SourceForge. Long has also developed Laban Key, a popular Vietnamese input method editor for Android and iOS devices that debuted in 2013.