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omarchy/manual/52-china.md
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China

Omarchy works out of the box in mainland China without a VPN. Pick China on the first screen of the installer, the region picker that comes before the keyboard layout, and the machine comes up ready: Chinese menus and system language, a Chinese input method, Chinese package mirrors, and the Chinese software people actually need.

What China sets up

Area China Global
Omarchy and Arch packages pkgs.omarchy.cn and the *-mirror.omarchy.cn mirrors first, the .org servers right behind them .org servers only
Language LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8, Chinese menu labels English
Input method Fcitx5 with Rime Ice and the Wanxiang grammar model; Ctrl + Space toggles between Chinese and English Fcitx5 compose only
Developer mirrors npm, PyPI and uv, Go, rustup and crates.io, RubyGems and Bundler, Maven Upstream registries
Software Install > China Apps and Setup > Claude Code API Hidden

Chinese text renders in the right Noto CJK variant everywhere: Simplified for Chinese, Traditional for Taiwan and Hong Kong, Japanese and Korean for those languages. That works in both regions.

Every package mirror lists the .cn server first and the .org server second. If the .cn mirror is unreachable, or a package is missing there, pacman falls through to .org, which works for anyone with their own VPN.

Input

The installer sets up Rime Ice offline, from data bundled on the ISO, so Chinese input works the moment you log in. Rime is the active input method and Ctrl + Space switches to plain US keyboard input and back. The input method is installed by rime-ice-installer; run rime-ice-installer again any time to adjust it.

Developer mirrors

China machines point the common package managers at mirrors inside China through drop-ins Omarchy owns: /etc/environment.d/90-omarchy-china.conf (npm, PyPI and uv, Go, rustup, Bundler, Maven), /.cargo/config.toml (crates.io) and /etc/gemrc (RubyGems). They take effect from your next login. A project's own configuration still wins, and Omarchy never replaces one of those files if you created it yourself.

China Apps

Install > China Apps installs WeChat, QQ, Feishu, DingTalk, Tencent Meeting and WPS Office from the AUR, and sets up Tencent Docs, Yuque and Shimo as web apps.

Claude Code with a Chinese model

Setup > Claude Code API points Claude Code at DeepSeek, Kimi Code, GLM, MiniMax or any Anthropic-compatible endpoint. Pick a provider, paste its API key and confirm the model. The answers land in the env block of ~/.claude/settings.json. Kimi Code (kimi) and Dim Agent (dim) are preinstalled in every region; see AI.

Switching regions

Setup > Region switches an installed machine either way, or run omarchy region china or omarchy region global from a terminal. Log out and back in afterwards so the language and developer mirrors follow.

Switching to Global moves packages back to the .org servers, the language back to English, and removes the developer mirrors, China Apps and the Claude Code API setup. It keeps the input method and the CJK fonts, so you can still type and read Chinese. omarchy update never changes the region or the language; only these switches do.

A machine prepared for another owner, or reset to factory settings, keeps its region but doesn't carry the input method's offline data. Pick Setup > Region > China once it's online to set Rime Ice up.