The RoLLing cOde

Ever since my upgrade to Snow Leopard in 2009, it has long been a pain that input methods freeze my MBP from time to time, usually when there’s high work load like indexing (mds). I filed a bug report (radar 7757239) to Apple, attached all necessary process dumps as asked and even recorded a video to explain the user experience, got back hardly helpful.

So I decided to go after that myself. The first thing I tried is switching to use same Input Source in all document in Text Input Preference, this has some effect but does not help too much. Secondly, a notable difference between 10.5 and 10.6 on text input is a new visual input method switcher when you push and hold Cmd+Space, which is called TISwitcher. Disable it via launchd, everything seems back to normal.

sudo su -
killall TISwitcher
cd /System/Library/LaunchAgents/
defaults write com.apple.tiswitcher.plist Disabled -bool yes
chmod 644 com.apple.tiswitcher.plist

Also for those who are not quite fond of fancy new features in FIT or QIM, here’s SunPinyin 2.0.3 for Mac, my private build for latest update of the simple and handy input method.