@freemo And for professional shorthand usage, PinYin is not the only option, there are special keyboards which designed to use custom key combinations to input character and/or word. But most of the time a qwert keyboard is working just fine. I think that special keyboard is not that need as we now have more advanced method to infer which word might fit your need based on your input context. I still remember when I was young, the default Chinese input method from WindowsXP is a nightmare to use. So we have to install dedicated software to replace it. Nowadays I'm super fine with the default input method from Windows10. And for linux, I think Rime is not that bad.