LangSwitch

KDE Plasma–style language switcher OSD for Windows

Switch keyboard layouts with a beautiful, non-intrusive OSD — just like KDE Plasma on Linux, but for Windows.

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✨ Features

• 🪟 KDE Plasma–inspired OSD — elegant floating indicator appears on layout switch, then fades out automatically
• ⌨️ Custom Hotkey Support — adds Ctrl+Shift as a fast and convenient global shortcut for switching languages
• 🎨 Follows your system theme — adapts to Windows light/dark mode and accent color
• 🖱️ Fully click-through — the overlay never steals focus or blocks interaction
• 📌 Tray icon — lives quietly in the system tray; right-click to toggle or quit
• ⚡ Minimal footprint — written in Rust, ~2 MB binary, near-zero CPU/RAM usage
• 🔕 No taskbar clutter — OSD window is completely invisible outside of active display

📸 Preview

The OSD popup appears near your cursor for ~1.8 seconds when you press Ctrl+Shift (or standard Windows shortcuts), then smoothly fades out:

demo.mp4

🚀 Installation

Option 0 — Via WinGet (recommended)

winget install stormsia.LangSwitch

Option 1 — Download Installer (Recommended)

1. Go to Releases
2. Download & run langswitch-*.msi from the latest release
3. It will install LangSwitch to C:\Program Files\LangSwitch, add a Start Menu shortcut, and automatically configure it to run on Windows startup.

Option 2 — Download release binary

1. Go to Releases
2. Download langswitch.exe from the latest release
3. Run it — the tray icon will appear immediately

Autostart: Place a shortcut in shell:startup (Win+R → type shell:startup) to launch on login.

Option 3 — Build from source

Requirements: Rust toolchain (stable), Windows 10/11

git clone [https://github.com/stormsia/LangSwitch.git](https://github.com/stormsia/LangSwitch.git)
cd LangSwitch
cargo build --release
# Binary: target/release/langswitch.exe

🖱️ Usage

Action	Result
Press Ctrl + Shift	Switches the language and shows OSD
Press standard Windows hotkey	OSD appears with new language, fades in 1.8s
Right-click tray icon → Intercept keys	Toggle key interception on/off
Right-click tray icon → Quit	Exit LangSwitch

LangSwitch provides a built-in Ctrl+Shift shortcut, but it also works with whatever hotkey Windows uses for layout switching (e.g., Alt+Shift or Win+Space).

⚙️ How it works

1. A global keyboard hook intercepts layout-switch key combos (including the built-in Ctrl+Shift shortcut)
2. ActivateKeyboardLayout switches the active layout
3. A Slint OSD window with WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW | WS_EX_TRANSPARENT | WS_EX_TOPMOST displays the new layout abbreviation near the cursor
4. The window fades out via opacity animation, then is hidden via Win32 — leaving no trace

🏗️ Tech stack

Component	Technology
Language	Rust
UI / OSD	Slint
Win32 API	windows-rs
Tray icon	tray-icon
Concurrency	crossbeam-channel

📋 Requirements

• Windows 10 or Windows 11 (x64)
• No runtime dependencies — fully static binary

🤝 Contributing

Issues and PRs are welcome! If you have ideas for features (multi-monitor improvements, config file, more OSD styles), open an issue to discuss.

📄 License

MIT © 2026 stormsia