Fix text typed in the wrong keyboard layout — for any two keyboard layouts
installed on your Mac, not just English and Russian.
Ever type a whole sentence only to realize your keyboard was in the wrong language?
Ghbdtn vbh! instead of Привет мир! — or Руддщ Цщкдв! instead of Hello World!
Select the text, press ⌥⌘S, and it's fixed in place.
The app reads the character map of every layout macOS has installed, so it works for pairs that hardcoded English↔Russian tools can't reach: Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian — and same-script pairs like QWERTY↔AZERTY or QWERTY↔QWERTZ.
Русский: Bilingual Switcher исправляет текст, набранный не в той раскладке: выделил, нажал хоткей — готово (
ghbdtn→привет). Работает с любой парой раскладок, установленных в системе, а не только с русской и английской. Установка через Homebrew или DMG — см. раздел Install.
- Any pair of keyboard layouts — reads them through the macOS
UCKeyTranslateAPI at runtime. No hardcoded mappings, no built-in language list (layouts, not CJK input methods — what that means) - Never watches you type — no event tap, no keystroke buffer. macOS wakes the app on your hotkey and at no other moment
- Deterministic — converts exactly what you selected, key by key, from the system's own layout tables. No word lists, no language model, no guessing
- Nothing happens on its own — it fires when you press the hotkey. Your text is never rewritten while you type
- Works everywhere — GUI apps, terminals (iTerm, Terminal.app, Claude Code), text editors
- Configurable hotkey — any key combination, or a modifier-only tap like ⌥⌘ (default: ⌥⌘S)
- Auto-switch keyboard layout — optionally switch to the target language after conversion
- Launch at Login — start automatically with macOS
- Auto-updates — built-in update checking via Sparkle
- Small enough to read — native Swift, no Electron, no bundled runtime or downloaded models
These are design choices, and they are the reason the app is worth trusting with an Accessibility grant:
- No keylogger. The app installs no
CGEventTap. In the default mode it registers your shortcut with the system, which then delivers that one combination and nothing else. If you bind a modifier-only combo, the app adds a single passive monitor that can see key events — it reads only that a key was pressed, to cancel the gesture, never which key (ModifierOnlyHotkeyMonitor.swift). - No Input Monitoring permission. That grant exists to gate event taps. The app doesn't use one, so macOS never asks.
- No dictionaries, no autocorrect. Nothing is guessed from your vocabulary, so code, transliteration, brand names and mixed technical text convert as reliably as prose.
- No telemetry. No analytics, no crash reporting, no accounts. The only network access is the optional Sparkle update check.
Your clipboard is used: the app copies the selection with ⌘C, then puts the clipboard back exactly as it was — every item, every data type, in the original order. See How it works.
Verifying the above is meant to be practical rather than aspirational: the source is small enough to read end to end, and every commit runs the test suite in CI — plus the same suite again under AddressSanitizer, and a static analysis pass.
A keyboard layout is the kind of input source where one physical key produces one character. The app converts between any two of them you have installed, in either direction — that is what "any two" above means, and it covers most of the world's languages.
Tested: English, Russian, Ukrainian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian
Same-script pairs work too: QWERTY↔AZERTY, QWERTY↔QWERTZ, Dvorak, Colemak — the app compares layouts, not alphabets
Should work (same mechanism): Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Polish, Czech, Turkish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Romanian, Hungarian, and any other standard keyboard layout
Input methods are a different thing, and out of scope. Chinese, Japanese and Korean don't map a key to a character — you type a sequence and choose from candidates. Text typed with the wrong one isn't mis-mapped characters that can be translated back; recovering it means re-running the composing engine. That is a different problem, and this app does not solve it.
brew tap komandakycto/bilingual-switcher https://github.com/komandakycto/bilingual-switcher.git
brew install --cask bilingual-switcherHomebrew strips the macOS quarantine flag for you, so the app opens without
Gatekeeper prompts — and brew upgrade keeps it current.
Download the latest .dmg from Releases, open it, and drag the app to Applications.
Gatekeeper notice: releases are signed with a stable identity but are not notarized with Apple, so Gatekeeper blocks the first launch. Before opening:
xattr -cr /Applications/BilingualSwitcher.appOr: try to open the app, get blocked, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → scroll down → Open Anyway.
You can verify the download integrity with SHA256 checksums from the release page.
Requires Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install).
git clone https://github.com/komandakycto/bilingual-switcher.git
cd bilingual-switcher
make setup # downloads Sparkle framework
make
make install # copies to /Applications- Launch the app — it appears as an icon in the menu bar
- Grant Accessibility permission when asked — System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility (required to read/replace selected text). The app picks it up as soon as you turn it on; no restart needed.
- Select the wrongly-typed text in any app
- Press the hotkey (default:
⌥⌘S— Option + Command + S) - The text is converted in place
Selecting text inside terminal TUIs (Claude Code, vim, htop, lazygit): full-screen terminal apps capture the mouse, so a plain click-drag is sent to the app instead of creating a selection — leaving nothing for the hotkey to copy. Hold Shift while dragging in kitty, or Option in iTerm2, to force a real terminal selection (other terminals have a similar modifier to bypass mouse reporting), then press the hotkey. If you press the hotkey with nothing selected, the app beeps.
Menu bar icon → Preferences → click the shortcut field → press your desired combination → Save.
You can also bind a modifier-only combo like ⌥⌘ — press and release the modifiers together with no other key. Two or more modifiers are required, and it fires only on a clean release, so ⌥⌘C and other real shortcuts still work as usual.
| You typed | You get |
|---|---|
Ghbdtn vbh! |
Привет мир! |
Руддщ Цщкдв! |
Hello World! |
Dctv ghbdtn |
Всем привет |
Рфззн Ишкесфн |
Happy Birthday |
The app uses the macOS UCKeyTranslate API to read the character map of every keyboard layout installed on your system. When triggered:
- Copies the selected text (simulates ⌘C)
- Scores the text against each installed layout to detect which one produced it
- Converts each character via physical key codes: source layout char → key code → target layout char
- Deletes the original and pastes the result
- Restores your original clipboard — every item and data type, in the order it had
With 3+ layouts installed, the app tracks the two you most recently switched between and converts within that pair.
- macOS 13.0 (Ventura) or later
- Accessibility permission (the app asks on first launch)
Those builds were ad-hoc signed, so macOS tied your Accessibility grant to that exact binary. Updating past them invalidates it: the app still shows in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility with the toggle on, but macOS no longer honours it. Toggling it off and on does not help.
Remove Bilingual Switcher from that list with −, then add it back with +. The app offers to do this for you when it detects the situation. This is a one-time step — releases are now signed with a stable identity, so the permission survives future updates.
See CONTRIBUTING.md for build instructions and guidelines.