kbswitch2 lets you switch quickly and easily between keyboard layouts
in Windows.
If you’ve ever used Mac OS X – it’s now as easy as that.
If you’ve never used Mac OS X, trust me: that means it’s easy.
- Unintrusive. One discreet notification area icon. (Also, doesn’t randomly mess up Visual Studio debugging.)
- Doesn’t use a keyboard shortcut. No more accidental layout switches. (Note: can be integrated with keyboard shortcut programs such as AutoHotkey, if you want keyboard control.)
- Reliable. No more arguments with the language bar.
- Hassle-free. No installation required, can run off thumb drive, doesn’t change your profile, doesn’t save anything to disk.
kbswitch2 is experimental - you need to get it from the github repo!
Copy kbswitch2’s bin folder somewhere (rename it if you like), and
run kbswitch2.exe. You could put a shortcut to it in the Startup
folder of your Start Menu, so that it runs when Windows starts.
kbswitch2 doesn’t need to save any data anywhere. You can run it off
a flash drive or other removable storage.
When kbswitch2 is running, it will keep a little icon in the
notification area, that looks a bit like a closeup of a keyboard.
Hover over the icon to see the currently set layout.
Right-click on the icon to get a popup menu listing available keyboard layouts. Select one to change to that layout.
Select “Exit” to exit. The current keyboard layout remains set for active applications. You may find that when you run other applications, they use your default keyboard layout.
(You can re-run kbswitch2 to sort this out.)
kbswitch2 supports a couple of command line options.
/showWindow- if specified, show a normal window as well as the notification icon. You can right click in the window to get the popup menu./nextLayout,/prevLayoutdoes nothing unless =kbswitch2= is already running - select the next or previous keyboard layout in the list. Intended for use with AutoHotkey, so you can assign keyboard shortcuts to cycle through the list of layouts. (Ifkbswitch2isn’t running, doing this will do absolutely nothing, so you won’t loadkbswitch2accidentally.)
If you specify anything else on the command line, it’s interpreted as
the name (ignoring case) of a keyboard layout to select. If
kbswitch2 is running, that layout will be selected; if it’s not
running, it will be started.
For example, to select the Dvorak layout:
kbswitch2 "united states-dvorak"
When you change the keyboard layout from the command line, the tooltip will pop up for a second so that you know it’s taken effect.
(kbswitch2 should be usable with any keyboard shortcut program; I
just happen to be a user of AutoHotkey!)
You can use the command line options to run kbswitch2 from
AutoHotkey, so that you can have keyboard shortcuts for cycling
keyboard layouts or selecting particular layouts.
For example, you could use something like this, to cycle through the keyboard layouts when Windows+Space is pressed, as in Windows 8:
#Space::Run c:\kbswitch\kbswitch2.exe /nextLayout
Or you could use something like this, to select the Dvorak layout when Windows+D is pressed:
#d::Run c:\kbswitch\kbswitch2.exe "united states-dvorak"
(Replace c:\kbswitch\ above with the directory you’re running
kbswitch2 from.)
- kbswitch2 is experimental!
- If you change language when a program is loading, it may not pick up
the change. To fix this, use
kbswitchto reselect the selected language once the program looks to be ready. - XP only - the Ctrl+Alt+Del screen uses your default keyboard. Watch out when using keyboard shortcuts, and in particular when entering your password!
- The code for DVAssist demonstrated how to change the layout properly. (My original attempt was way over-complicated, and didn’t work anyway.)
- The icon comes from a freeware icons collection that I downloaded a few years ago.
kbswitch snail tomseddon dot plus dot com