Also available in: Українська · Русский
Switcher3way notices when you've typed a word in the wrong keyboard layout and fixes it — retyping the word in the layout you meant and switching the keyboard for you. It works across all your installed layouts (e.g. English, Ukrainian, Russian), not just a pair.
It runs in the menu bar on macOS and in the notification area on Windows. This guide is written with the macOS names for menus and settings; the Windows app has the same settings under the same names, reached from the tray icon.
- How detection works
- First launch
- The menu bar
- Converting by hand: the trigger key
- Auto-fix: converting as you type
- Exceptions
- Settings reference
- Pausing the app
- Privacy
- Troubleshooting & FAQ
When you finish a word, Switcher3way renders the keystrokes you actually pressed through every keyboard layout installed on your Mac that has a macOS dictionary, and checks each candidate word against its own language's dictionary. Only when exactly one candidate is a valid word does it convert and switch the layout.
This is deliberately precision-first: a word that looks like code, is ALL-CAPS, or is very short is left alone rather than guessed at. A missed fix costs you one trigger tap; a wrong fix costs you trust.
A typo is not treated as a wrong layout. Before converting a word, the app checks whether the language you are already typing in has a real word one keystroke away — a dropped letter, a doubled one, two letters swapped. If it does, the simpler explanation is that you missed a key, and the word is left alone. This is why fumbling a word while writing Ukrainian no longer throws it into English and drags the layout with it.
Very short words wait for their sentence. Under about four letters, a dictionary hit means almost
nothing — a quarter of all two-letter Latin strings are in the English dictionary, mostly as
abbreviations like ft or lb. So the app does not decide such a word on its own: it uses the
language the rest of the phrase has settled into. If nothing has settled it yet, the word is left on
screen untouched and converted a moment later, together with the first word long enough to settle the
question — or, in a message where every word is short, as soon as two of them agree. A word left alone
because it was truly the only thing you typed is always fixable with one tap of the trigger.
Words valid in both Ukrainian and Russian (там, добре) get special treatment: they are
converted to the language for ambiguous words (Settings → Auto-fix; Ukrainian by default).
If the phrase you're typing later turns out to be the other language — a word appears that's
valid only in it — the earlier ambiguous words are re-converted automatically, in one step
you can undo with a single trigger tap. Set the option to Do not convert to keep such words
untouched instead.
macOS requires two permissions before any layout switcher can work:
| Permission | Why Switcher3way needs it |
|---|---|
| Accessibility | To read and retype the mistyped word |
| Input Monitoring | To see your keystrokes and the trigger key |
On first launch a setup checklist window opens. For each permission, click Open Settings, flip the switch for Switcher3way in System Settings → Privacy & Security, and come back — the checklist detects the grant by itself within a couple of seconds. After Input Monitoring is granted, the app restarts itself once (macOS requires it). The same window offers a Launch at login switch.
Closing the window loses nothing: your grants stay, and the checklist can be reopened from the menu (Check Permissions… — the item appears only while something is missing).
Installed from source? The app is unnotarized, so the very first launch on a new Mac needs right-click → Open.
The status icon shows the flag of the active layout (🇺🇸 / 🇺🇦 / 🇷🇺 …) and live-tracks switches made by any means, including the system shortcut. While the app is paused or turned off, the icon gains a ⏸ prefix — a disabled switcher never looks enabled.
Click the icon to open the menu:
- Header — the current layout (badge + name), a reminder of your trigger key, and the app version.
- Quick toggles — Auto-fix as I type, Layout sound, Flag at cursor. These mirror the corresponding switches in Settings.
- Pause Switcher3way ▸ — see Pausing the app.
- Help (⌘?) — opens this guide right in the app, in your interface language.
- Settings… (⌘,) and Quit (⌘Q).
Two optional signals about layout changes (both off by default):
- Layout sound — a short sound on the first keystroke after the layout changed, so a switch never goes unnoticed.
- Flag at cursor — briefly shows the layout flag next to the text caret after a switch. It works wherever apps expose the caret position via Accessibility; a few editors that draw their own text (e.g. the VS Code editor area) don't.
Typed a word in the wrong layout? Tap the trigger key — by itself, without any other key — and Switcher3way converts the last word you typed and switches the layout. If you select text first, the selection is converted instead.
Tap the trigger again without typing anything in between to step through the other layouts: each extra tap retypes the word in the next installed layout and switches to it, and one more tap past the last one brings back your original text and layout. With two layouts this is just the familiar "tap again to undo"; with three or more it lets you reach any layout by tapping.
The trigger is configurable in Settings → General → Trigger:
- Convert with — Option ⌥ (default), Command ⌘, Control ⌃, Shift ⇧, or a two-key combo (⌘⇧, ⌃⇧, ⌘⌥, ⌃⌥) in the style of Windows' Alt+Shift.
- Right key only — react only to the right-hand modifier key.
- Require double tap — conversion fires on a quick double tap instead of a single tap. Useful when the chosen key is one you often tap alone by accident (e.g. Shift).
The manual trigger is fully N-way: it converts to the best-matching layout, and because it's an explicit request it acts even on words that Auto-fix would leave alone (for example a word that's valid in more than one language) — just tap again to move to the next candidate if the first guess wasn't what you wanted. There is no layout pair to configure.
When two layouts spell a word the same way. Ukrainian and Russian share most letters, so a word
with no і/ї/є or ы/э/ъ looks identical in both. You get one cycle step for it, not two — an extra
tap that changed nothing visible would look like the app was broken. The layout that step switches
to is the one the dictionary points at (хорошо → Russian), and for a word that exists in both
languages it follows Language for ambiguous words in Settings → Auto-fix, the same preference
Auto-fix uses. Set that to Do not convert and the trigger simply takes the next layout in order.
After an Auto-fix, the trigger keeps cycling. Auto-fix picks one layout; tapping the trigger —
with no typing in between — walks through the other installed layouts for the same word, and one
more tap brings back exactly what you typed and the layout you were in. Type dblyj, let Auto-fix
make it видно in Ukrainian, then tap: Russian, then back to dblyj. So undoing an Auto-fix takes
one tap when there is only one other candidate, and one tap per remaining layout otherwise.
Learning from undo: if Auto-fix converted a word and you immediately undo it with the trigger, Switcher3way offers to add that word to the Never convert list so it won't be touched again. The offer arrives as a notification with a Add to exceptions button — it never interrupts your typing, and ignoring it simply leaves the lists unchanged.
Password fields: the trigger does nothing in a password field. That is deliberate — an explicit request still isn't a reason to read or rewrite a credential. See Privacy below for how a password field is recognised.
Seeing what changed: when a conversion happens, a small badge appears next to the cursor showing what you typed, struck through, and what replaced it — plus the trigger key, as a reminder of how to undo it. Turn it off with Settings → General → Show what was corrected. If an app doesn't tell macOS where its cursor is, the badge appears near the window instead.
When there's nothing to convert: the trigger always answers. If it can't do anything it tells you why, at the cursor and as a notification, rather than appearing dead. The usual reason is that only one keyboard layout is installed — Switcher3way converts between the layouts your system has, so with a single one there is nothing to convert between; add Ukrainian or Russian and try again. You'll also see it when nothing has been typed or selected yet, when the text is already right for the current layout, and when a selection is longer than 200 characters.
Off by default. Enable it in Settings → Auto-fix or via the menu's quick toggle.
When enabled, every finished word (you typed a space) is run through the detection described above and converted automatically when there is an unambiguous winner. Auto-fix additionally holds back when:
- the frontmost app is in the Apps exception list (terminals, IDEs, password managers…);
- the word is in Never convert;
- the focused field is a password field (see Privacy below);
- you moved the cursor, clicked, or switched apps mid-word — converting then could damage the wrong text;
- the word looks like code, is ALL-CAPS, or is too short.
Words in Always convert are converted even if the dictionary doesn't know them.
Ambiguous words and phrases. A word valid in both Ukrainian and Russian converts to the language for ambiguous words (default: Ukrainian). Auto-fix then remembers the phrase you're typing (until Enter, a click, an arrow key, or an app switch). If a later word is valid in only one language, the phrase's ambiguous words are re-converted to that language together with it — one replacement, one trigger-tap undo. Phrases that mix clearly-Ukrainian and clearly-Russian words are never touched retroactively.
Jargon and names the dictionaries don't know. Slang, tech loanwords and names (апка,
айді, Kyiv) are valid in no dictionary, so for a long time they simply stayed as typed.
Auto-fix now rescues them when the evidence is one-sided: what you typed is unpronounceable
gibberish in the layout it landed in, while its reading in another layout looks like a real
word shape. fgrf becomes апка (using the same language for ambiguous words; set it to
Do not convert and this rescue is off too), and Лншм typed in a Cyrillic layout becomes
Kyiv. Words that look plausible in the layout you typed them in — names, acronyms, code —
are never touched, and a rescued word undoes with one trigger tap like any conversion.
Settings → Auto-fix → Exceptions manages all three lists in one place. Use the segmented filter to switch between them (counts shown live), the search field to find entries, and the + Add button to add an app (file picker) or a word (text prompt). Select an entry and press − to remove it.
- Apps — applications where Auto-fix never runs. Ships with sensible defaults (terminals,
IDEs, password managers). Password managers are marked 🔒 always off and cannot be
removed. Entries ending in
*match a vendor prefix (e.g. all JetBrains apps). - Never convert — words Auto-fix must never touch: nicknames, logins, brand names. The undo-learning notification adds words here.
- Always convert — words to convert even though no dictionary contains them.
The exception lists apply to Auto-fix; the manual trigger always obeys you.
Open with ⌘, from the menu. Four tabs:
- Status card — master on/off switch for the whole app (trigger + Auto-fix).
- Trigger — the trigger key, right-key-only, double-tap (see above). Both the trigger and Auto-fix are N-way over all installed layouts; there is no layout pair to pick.
- Show what was corrected — the badge next to the cursor after a conversion (on by default).
- System — Launch at login, Remember layout per app (restores each app's last layout when you switch back to it), Interface language (16 languages; "System default" follows macOS).
The automatic-conversion master switch, the Language for ambiguous words popup (Ukrainian / Russian / Do not convert — see Auto-fix above), and the exception lists.
- Show layout flag at the cursor (beta) — briefly shows the layout flag next to the text caret after a switch (the same Flag at cursor feature described above).
- Remote Desktop mode (beta) — for Apple Screen Sharing: run Switcher3way on the remote Mac too and enable this on both.
- Debug logging — off by default; when enabled the app writes
~/Library/Logs/Switcher3w/switcher3w.log(rotated at 5 MB). Show Log File reveals it in Finder. Useful for bug reports. It records decisions, including the words being decided about — see Privacy for exactly what does and does not reach it.
App name and version.
Menu → Pause Switcher3way ▸ offers 30 minutes, 1 hour, or until restart. While paused, nothing converts and the status icon shows ⏸. Timed pauses resume automatically — even if the app is relaunched in between; "until restart" ends when the app is restarted. Select Resume to end any pause immediately.
Switcher3way checks its own releases page shortly after launch and once a day, and offers new versions in a dialog. Install and Relaunch downloads the update, verifies it (checksum and code-signing identity), replaces the app, and relaunches — your permissions are kept. Later asks again on the next check; Skip This Version stays quiet about that version until a newer one appears. Turn the automatic check off in Settings → General → Check for updates automatically; you can always check manually via menu → Check for Updates…. Update checks talk only to GitHub and send nothing about you or your typing.
Detection and conversion happen entirely locally on your Mac — no telemetry, no dictionaries downloaded (it uses the macOS system dictionaries). The only network access is the optional update check (see above): a request to GitHub for the latest release version, which you can switch off in Settings → General. Keystrokes are held only in a short in-memory buffer for the current word and are never written to disk.
On Windows, the clipboard is used for long corrections. Replacing a long selection or phrase — more than about two dozen characters — is done by putting the corrected text on the clipboard, pasting it, and restoring your previous clipboard contents immediately. Typing text that long one keystroke at a time turned out to be unreliable: applications sometimes received it garbled. Shorter corrections, which is nearly all of them, are typed and never touch the clipboard. The text is always your own, on its way back into your document, and nothing is stored or sent — but a clipboard-history tool may record that momentary entry, as it would for anything you copy.
Password fields. Neither Auto-fix, nor the trigger, nor the badge does anything while a password field has focus. A field counts as one when any of these is true:
- macOS signals secure input — the classic case, and until recently the only check;
- the focused control is a secure text field as macOS describes it — what a masked
type="password"box in a browser publishes; - the focused text field is labelled as a password (in any of a dozen languages, matched against whatever the page or app calls it) even when it is not masked.
That last one matters: any login form with a "show password" toggle turns its box into ordinary text while revealed, and some sites mask in their own code and never use a real password field. Neither sets the secure-input flag. The check errs on the side of doing nothing — a field labelled "password" is left alone even if it isn't one.
The debug log. Opt-in, and off unless you switch it on. It never records which keys you
pressed — only that a keystroke was buffered and how many are in the buffer. It does record
the word being decided about, on the line where a conversion is decided; that line cannot be
reached for a password field, because the check above runs first. If you have had logging on
and want the history gone, delete ~/Library/Logs/Switcher3w/.
Notifications. Switcher3way notifies you in exactly two cases: a rewrite it could not apply, and the offer to remember a word after you undo a conversion. It never notifies on success. If you decline notification permission, both simply go to the log and nothing else changes.
Nothing converts at all. Check permissions first: if the menu shows Check Permissions…, a grant is missing — click it and follow the checklist. Verify the app isn't paused (⏸ in the menu bar) and the status card in Settings → General says On.
A specific word never auto-converts. Most likely it's absent from the macOS dictionary of the target language, or the language for ambiguous words is set to Do not convert. Add it to Always convert, or just use the trigger — manual conversion doesn't require dictionary confidence.
Auto-fix converted something it shouldn't have. Tap the trigger to undo — you'll be offered to add the word to Never convert. If it happens in one particular app, add that app to the Apps exception list.
The trigger fires when I don't want it to. Enable Require double tap, or Right key only, or move the trigger to a two-key combo.
Permissions reset after I rebuilt the app from source.
Rebuilds must be signed with the same stable certificate — see signing/README.md in the
repository. Ad-hoc-signed builds lose TCC grants on every rebuild.
Layout names show in the wrong language. Names follow the app's interface language. If you force an interface language different from the macOS system language, language-neutral names (e.g. "Russian", "Terminal") are used by design.
Where do I report a bug?
Enable Debug logging (Settings → Advanced), reproduce the issue, and attach
~/Library/Logs/Switcher3w/switcher3w.log — it contains decision traces (auto: … lines) but
not the text you typed.