You are sharing your screen in a meeting and type a message to a colleague. Before the characters commit, your input method editor (IME) shows a candidate window — the small popup listing suggested words, conversions, or emoji predictions. Everyone in the meeting can read it.

For languages that use IMEs — Chinese (Pinyin, Zhuyin), Japanese (Romaji-to-Kana conversion), Korean (Hangul composition), Hindi and other Indic scripts — this popup is a steady stream of half-typed, private thoughts.

What actually leaks

• Unconverted romanization. Typing gongsi jiezhi le before conversion exposes phonetic spelling of what you intend to write.
• The candidate list itself. Suggestions are ranked by your habits; the top entries often complete sentences you did not mean to show.
• Predictive text and emoji bars. Cloud-backed keyboards may surface completions pulled from your recent private conversations.

Because the candidate window floats above every application, minimizing your chat window does not remove it — it renders on top of whatever you share next.

Why ordinary fixes fall short

Hiding the chat application does not hide the IME popup, because it belongs to the input method process, not to the chat app. Dragging the popup around is fighting your own typing flow. Turning off the IME is only an option if you switch to typing pure ASCII — impractical for CJK languages.

Some IMEs offer a "dark mode for candidate window" or transparency toggle; none of those change what a screen capture sees.

The capture-level answer

The same Windows capture-exclusion mechanism used to hide private windows (Windows' built-in capture exclusion) can be applied to IME candidate windows too. Because candidate windows are owned by the input method process, a tool must reach into that process the same way it reaches into chat apps.

HideMyShare treats IME candidate windows as first-class citizens: once enabled, the candidate popup is removed from the shared stream while remaining fully visible to you. New candidate windows — the IME recreates them constantly — are re-protected within about a second.

FAQ

Does this work for Japanese Romaji conversion and Chinese Pinyin? Yes. Any candidate window drawn by the IME process can be excluded from capture the same way as any other window.

Will my typing slow down? No. Exclusion is a rendering flag; it does not change how the IME processes input.

What about cloud input methods that suggest from my history? The candidate window is hidden from viewers either way — but for the content itself, prefer a local-only IME. Exclusion protects the share, not what your keyboard vendor stores in the cloud.

Try it

HideMyShare hides chat windows and IME candidate windows from screen sharing with one click. Free 7-day trial, no account required.

→ Download HideMyShare