Language Selection and Reordering

Language Selection & Dropdown Reordering

Mastodon allows tagging every published post with an ISO language code (e.g. en, da, fr, de). This ensures proper fediverse search indexing, automated translation matching, and user timeline filtering.

Mastui provides a curated, customizable language selector in the post composer so you can quickly tag posts without scrolling through hundreds of world languages.

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📋 Default Language Catalog

Mastui includes an extensive built-in catalog of 47+ world languages and regional variants (defined in mastui/languages.py):

Code	Language	Code	Language	Code	Language
ar	Arabic	en-us	English (US)	lv	Latvian
bg	Bulgarian	eo	Esperanto	lt	Lithuanian
ca	Catalan	et	Estonian	ms	Malay
zh	Chinese (Simplified)	fi	Finnish	nb	Norwegian Bokmål
zh-hk	Chinese (Hong Kong)	fr	French	pl	Polish
zh-tw	Chinese (Traditional)	gl	Galician	pt	Portuguese
hr	Croatian	de	German	pt-br	Portuguese (Brazil)
cs	Czech	el	Greek	ro	Romanian
da	Danish	he	Hebrew	ru	Russian
nl	Dutch	hi	Hindi	sr	Serbian
en	English	hu	Hungarian	sk	Slovak
en-gb	English (UK)	id	Indonesian	sl	Slovenian
ga	Irish	it	Italian	es	Spanish
ja	Japanese	ko	Korean	sv	Swedish
th	Thai	tr	Turkish	uk	Ukrainian
vi	Vietnamese	cy	Welsh

By default, Mastui populates your composer dropdown with a fast-access set: da, en, fr, de, ja, ko, es, zh.

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🔄 Customizing & Re-Ordering via the UI

You can customize which languages appear in your composer and change their exact order of appearance:

1. Press o to open the Mastui Options screen.
2. Scroll to the Language Preferences section:

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ▼ Language Preferences                                │
│   ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│   │ English (en)                         [↑] [↓] [x] │ │
│   │ Danish (da)                          [↑] [↓] [x] │ │
│   │ German (de)                          [↑] [↓] [x] │ │
│   │ French (fr)                          [↑] [↓] [x] │ │
│   │ Japanese (ja)                        [↑] [↓] [x] │ │
│   └──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
│   Add Language: [ Select Language to Add... ▼ ]        │
│   [ Reset to Defaults ]                                │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

3. Re-order Priorities: Click ↑ or ↓ on any row to promote or demote that language in the dropdown list.
4. Remove Unused Languages: Click x on any row to hide languages you do not write in.
5. Add New Languages: Use the Add Language dropdown to select any language from the 47+ catalog; it will be appended to your active list.
6. Reset: Click Reset to Defaults to restore the standard 8-language palette.
7. Click Save Options at the bottom of the dialog.

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✏️ Manual Configuration (.env)

Language preferences are stored per-profile in your ~/.config/mastui/profiles/<profile>/.env file under the POST_LANGUAGES key as a comma-separated list:

POST_LANGUAGES=en,da,de,ja

Rules & Formatting

• Codes are case-insensitive and whitespace is automatically trimmed.
• Regional dialect tags use standard hyphens (e.g. en-gb, pt-br, zh-tw).
• Duplicate codes are automatically deduplicated while preserving your defined ordering.
• If POST_LANGUAGES is empty or missing, Mastui falls back to the default language catalog.