Patchbay speaks Simplified Chinese, and it registers Codex. Both came from one
report, #14: a Quad Cortex
owner reading the app through Google Translate, connecting it to Codex, and
finding the registration "a little confusing" — for a reason that turned out
to be real.
This is an app-only release: qc_mcp, the daemon and the protocol are
identical to 0.1.3.
简体中文
- It follows the system. A Mac or PC set to Simplified Chinese gets a
Chinese Patchbay on first launch, with nothing to find first. The machine's
preferred-language list is walked in order and the first language Patchbay
speaks wins, so a Chinese reader whose OS happens to be English second still
gets Chinese. - Preferences opens with a language switcher — the first group in the
dialog, on purpose. Each language is listed by its own name with a flag, and
a System entry says which language it currently resolves to. - Everything switches at once. Not only the views: the Setup checklist, the
progress lines during an install, the daemon's errors, the leveling bench's
errors, the file dialogs and the update messages all come from the same
dictionary, in both processes, so a toast reads in the language of the button
that raised it. - Traditional Chinese (
zh-TW,zh-HK) is deliberately not mapped onto the
Simplified translation. It is one click away in the switcher, but nobody is
handed it. - Chinese text gets an explicit font stack — PingFang on macOS, Microsoft YaHei
on Windows — because the app's display face has no Han glyphs and the fallback
Chromium picks on its own is a serif on some Windows machines.
The translation is in
app/src/shared/i18n/zh-CN.ts,
typed against the English so a missing string fails the build rather than
showing up in English on a Chinese screen. Corrections are welcome as issues
or pull requests, in either language. There is a Chinese onboarding guide too:
app/README.zh-CN.md.
Codex
Codex was never a registration target — its MCP config is TOML, in
~/.codex/config.toml, not the JSON every other client uses. That is why its
setup felt incomplete: it was.
- Patchbay now writes the
[mcp_servers.quad-cortex]table there itself, and
touches nothing else in the file — a small one-table editor rather than a
TOML library, so comments, ordering and every other byte survive. - An entry from before the daemon (no
--attach, so it opens the device itself
and fails while the daemon holds it) is detected for Codex the same way it is
for the JSON clients, and Re-point fixes it. - Manage clients… now says, for every client you tick, what it does with
the entry after Apply and how to confirm it — new sessions, a restart, a
settings page,claude mcp list,codex mcp list— and shows the TOML
snippet beside the JSON one for anything set up by hand.
Also
- @singz/ui 1.5.0, which is where
the switcher lives: aLanguageSwitcherthat carries no strings and draws no
flags of its own, and aModalthat lets an open menu inside it take Escape
first instead of closing the whole dialog underneath. - Chromium's own locale packs for Chinese ship alongside English, so anything
Chromium draws by itself follows too.
Windows
Still unsigned: SmartScreen asks on first run, More info → Run anyway.
The installer the updater downloads is the same.
The Chinese interface has not been looked at on Windows hardware yet. The
font stack names Microsoft YaHei for it and the flags are SVG rather than emoji
precisely because Windows draws emoji flags as two letters — but if something is
off there, that is where to look first, and a screenshot in #14 would be
welcome.
Verified
The built app driven under Playwright on macOS: the switcher by mouse and by
keyboard, Escape closing the menu and leaving Preferences open, every view in
Chinese, and back to System. The Console correctly flagged a real
~/.codex/config.toml entry that lacked --attach.
The locale rules, the dictionaries' completeness and placeholders, and the TOML
table editor have unit tests, and CI runs them.