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.
The 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 programmingly, especially between complex input sources like CJK. Kawa once tried to resolve this problem using hacky workaround, which caused more bugs, did more bad than good. The option is removed in v0.1.3, and I decide to wait for the fix from macOS.
However, if a nice workaround is found, please upload it as an issue or PR. I would be happy to consider adopting it.
Preferences can be found in a preference window. The window can be opened by clicking the menubar icon of Kawa or launching Kawa again.
- General Stuff
Show Menubar Icon
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.Launch Kawa on startup
Add Kawa to startup items.
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 git@github.com:noraesae/kawa.git
$ carthage bootstrapTo open the Xcode project of Kawa:
$ open kawa.xcodeproj
You can surely open the project from Xcode.
Kawa can be built with the Product menu in Xcode as other Xcode projects
are built. If you prefer using command line, just run the build script.
$ ./build.sh
It will build the project and export Kawa.app to the project root.
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.