Kawa helps users to switch between keyboard input sources by user-defined shortcuts.
I use 3 input sources in my Mac, U.S., 2-Set Korean and Hiragana. When
I used to use only 2 sources, it was just fine. I needed to just stroke Command+Space
to switch between them. However, when the other was added, it became a mess.
In order to switch an input source to another, Command+Space should be
stroked several times. It's mainly because it switches a source to a
previously-selected source, and usually we don't always remember what it was.
There's another built-in shortcut, Alt+Command+Space, which switch the input
to a next language in system order. However, the order should be memorised to
avoid always checking which language is current. Although we've memorised the
order perfectly, we need to stroke the keys more than twice if the sources
are not adjecent. In short, it's a hell.
I'd always thought I needed an app like Kawa before I accidently became into Swift and decided to implement this by myself. I hope others can be helped by Kawa and escape from the input switching hell.
Cheers!
For better quality, there is a video version of this demo on Vimeo.
Using Homebrew
brew update
brew cask install kawaThe prebuilt binaries can be found in Releases.
Unzip Kawa.zip and move Kawa.app to Applications.
There is a known bug in the TIS library of macOS that switching keyboard layouts doesn't work well when done programmatically, especially between complex input sources like CJKV.
Kawa workarounded this bug by programmatically doing the followings:
- Select a target input source
- If the source is CJKV
- Switch to the first non-CJKV input source
- Return to the target input source by sending
Select the previous input sourceshortcut
Thus, to activate the workaround above, the following restrictions should meet.
- There is at least one non-CJKV input source in the input source list
- The
Select the previous input sourceshortcut should be enabled and set to something- It can be set in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Input Sources
Preferences can be found in a preference window. The window can be opened by clicking the menubar icon of Kawa or launching Kawa again.
Show the icon of Kawa in the OS X menubar. When you click the icon, a preference window will be opened. If this option is unset, the icon will be hidden and the preference window can be opened when launching Kawa again.
Add Kawa to startup items.
Show macOS notification on input source change.
We use Carthage as a dependency manager. You can find the latest releases of Carthage here, or just install it with Homebrew.
$ brew update
$ brew install carthageTo clone the Git repository of Kawa and install dependencies:
$ git clone [email protected]:utatti/kawa.git
$ carthage bootstrapAfter dependency installation, you can open and build the project with Xcode.
The application is quite simple and this README contains quite most of it. When you have a problem using Kawa, I would recommend reading this README again, carefully.
If there's still a problem, please upload it as an issue on Issues.
Kawa is released under the MIT License.