I have released a small piece of software which allows you to use romaji input mode with any keyboard layout in Microsoft Japanese IME.

This had been a long-time annoyance of mine, as typing certain symbols is difficult when you don’t have a U.S. keyboard layout.

I made a small piece of software which lists all your keyboard layouts and lets you modify the registry key accordingly with a GUI. The position of symbols unfortunately is still in the Japanese layout during hiragana/katakana mode, but this should obviate having two keyboard layouts for some people who switch to and from one other language frequently.

A .reg backup is also created which you can double-click to restore.

Please feel free to report any issues on the GitHub page.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/z0oP2dn.png

Release:
https://github.com/mistyhands/ChaoJpLayoutFixer/

As described on the GitHub page, a small percentage of antivirus software may flag this due to registry modification. The software is of course not malicious; it should be easy to verify and build by yourself with Visual Studio if you are so inclined.

5 comments
  1. > as typing certain symbols is difficult when you don’t have a U.S. keyboard layout.

    Seriously, it’s a pain. Not only are the special characters completely elsewhere, but also I constantly type „z“ when I want „y“ and vice versa.

  2. Interesting. One of my pet peeves (mostly writing in English, but prefer using AZERTY keyboard as I use notably FR and DE as well as Japanese) is that everything related to Japanese language use of websites, but in particular the IME seems stuck in the pre-Unicode period.

    I cannot find any explanation why for example, full romaji-based used of the IME cannot be done with the default keyboard layout under MS Windows. It’s just unbelievable and would probably take a developer at MS five minutes to fix if they bothered to take a look.

  3. You an actual legend, thank you so much! This will be incredibly useful as someone who frequently switches between two keyboards and finds himself having to switch keyboards midway through a sentence, this is a genuine life changer.

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