Show HN: Restore Per-App Keyboard Input Language on macOS

3 points by rado 16 hours ago

It’s been 20 years since OS X 10.4 introduced global input language switching — where the input language follows you from one app to the next. This has remained my single biggest frustration with macOS, especially as a multilingual keyboard power user. It disrupts my workflow by forcing the input language (e.g., Bulgarian) into new apps when I switch from one that was using it. There’s a system setting meant to preserve per-app input languages, but it only works when a text input field is focused — which isn’t helpful for keyboard-driven app control.

With some* help from AI, I built a small app that remembers and restores the input language for each app when you switch between them. It works fairly well, with a few quirks. For example, Spotlight always opens with the current input language instead of the system default, so I can’t launch apps unless I manually switch back to English.

Would anyone be interested in testing it out? And does anyone know how to resolve the Spotlight input issue?

Project: https://gitlab.com/spacest/InputLanguageKeeper Thanks!