Overview of keyboard layout switches. Punto Switcher - a program for automatically switching keyboards

Do you forget to change the language when typing on your computer? Having expressed your thoughts into structured written speech at the peak of mental activity, do you suddenly notice that the editor window displays abracadabra of symbols in another language? This problem is often encountered by those who work with typing in different languages. Users are not always able to develop the habit of double-checking the current input language before starting to write.

To solve this problem, there is a special type of program for Windows - keyboard layout switches. This kind of software, in addition to this function, can usually offer a lot of additional features for optimizing work with text. Let's look at four such programs below. Three of them can automatically change the input language, and one will do this only at our request. We will only consider offers from free software.

Product Yandex- This is perhaps the most famous solution on the Runet for automatically changing Russian and English layouts. If it detects data input in one language, while another language is installed, it instantly corrects the typed text and changes the layout to the desired one. In case of unwanted operation, there is a hot key for reverse conversion and language change.

Being a brainchild Yandex Among additional features, it offers a search for selected words in Wikipedia and search engine services.

From the program functionality:

Transliteration, changing case, writing numbers in words;
Setting custom rules for automatically switching layouts;
Automatic replacement of words using pre-prepared templates;
Diary – saving typed text in all Windows applications or only in certain ones into a special software environment;
Clipboard monitoring;
Sending text to Twitter;
Assignment of exception programs.

It can also check spelling, but only if the spell check module is installed in the system Microsoft Office.

More ascetic than the previous one, the program also serves to automatically switch layouts and auto-convert the typed text. She has less potential than , but a larger list of language support. Supported 24 language. From its functionality:

Correction of typos, double capital letters, incorrect case;

Conversion of previously printed text;

Automatic switching of the layout to the desired language when entering certain characters from the previously specified templates.

Another tool for automatically switching layouts and auto-editing text as you type it is . This is a multifunctional product, but not all features are available for free. On startup We will see a form for translating text. We will learn more about the free functions of the program in its settings.

Those that are not available in the free edition are marked "only in Pro version". What is available to us for free? These are, in particular:

Translation using web services Google Translate, Bing Translator, Yandex.Translator;
Spell check;
Cancel unwanted triggering;
Convert the case of letters and selected text;

Automatic layout switching according to specified templates;
Autocorrection of two capital letters;

Adding exception programs for which EveryLang will work only in part of the functions or will not work at all.

After activating the paid version Pro We will have access to such functions as: auto-correction of words, monitoring the clipboard, keeping a diary, converting dates and numbers into their uppercase values. We can also use the function SmartClick, which allows you to copy text and perform program operations using mouse keys.

U There is a portable version.

The latest program for replacing text with the desired layout is . Very simple, with a primitive interface, with a minimum of functions. Unlike previous participants in the review, it will not be able to transform the text as it is written, but it will do an excellent job of correcting already typed words and phrases at our request. To do this, you need to select the desired block of text and press the conversion hotkey. Among other possibilities :

Reverse spelling of words;
Letter case conversion;
Search for words and phrases on Google;
Translation using the Google Translate web service.

One of the program's functions is worth highlighting - sending typed text to mobile devices using QR code. We can type a document, message, to-do list, etc. on the computer, and the program will generate for this information QR code. Which, accordingly, can be read by our smartphone or tablet.

Punto Switcher is a program for automatically switching keyboard layouts. The program monitors the correct keyboard layout when typing on a computer, and if necessary, automatically replaces the keyboard layout.

Many people are familiar with the situation when, while typing on the keyboard, the user forgot to change the keyboard layout, for example, from English to Russian. The user enters the word “hello” thinking that he is typing text in the Russian keyboard layout, but in fact he is entering the word “ghbdtn” in the English keyboard layout. Punto Switcher will understand that the user has made a mistake and will switch to the correct keyboard layout.

Key features of the free Punto Switcher program:

automatic keyboard switching
autocorrect
fixing selected text and text on the clipboard
sound design
switch keyboard layout using hotkeys
maintaining a Diary in which all typed text is saved
saving the last 30 texts to the clipboard

In the Punto Switcher program, you can not only correct the layout and case, but also perform the following actions: check spelling, transliterate, clear selected text from formatting, etc.

When switching layouts, and in some other cases, Punto Switcher beeps, notifying you of these actions.

You can download the free Punto Switcher program from the official website of Yandex, the manufacturer of this application.

Punto Switcher download

Punto Switcher Settings

You can enter the settings of the Punto Switcher program from the notification area. After right-clicking on the program icon, select “Settings” from the context menu.

After this, the “Punto Switcher Settings” window will open. The program settings are located in several sections:

General - here you can configure general rules for the program’s operation
Hot keys - you can configure hot keys for more convenient control of the program
Switching rules - here you can configure the program in which cases you should switch the keyboard layout and in which cases you should not do this
Exception programs - you can add programs to the list in which you will need to disable automatic keyboard layout switching
Troubleshooting - here you can add some additional settings if problems occur
AutoCorrect - in this section you can specify abbreviations that will be automatically replaced with full words
Sounds - here are the sound settings for actions and events in the Punto Switcher program
Diary - you can save all text information typed on the keyboard

You can read more about working with the Punto Switcher Diary in a special article on my website.

The program offers several hotkey options for switching layouts. In the "General" section, you can activate the "Switch by:" item and then select hotkeys to quickly switch keyboard layouts. The Punto Switcher program responds to quick keystrokes in order to avoid conflicts with regular system shortcuts.

You can perform any actions using the Punto Switcher program using hot keys, or turning on the necessary functions after clicking on the program icon from the notification area.

Here you can quickly change some program settings: turn on or off auto-switching, sound effects, in the clipboard you can: change the layout, transliterate, check spelling, view the history, additionally you can enable diary keeping, view the diary, make an autocorrect list, send the selected text on Twitter, view system properties, convert numbers to text.

Using the program, you can find the necessary information on external resources on the Internet. Select “Find” from the context menu, and then decide where to look for the information you need.

Fixing typing errors in Punto Switcher

When typing words that have impossible combinations of letters in Russian or English, Punto Switcher will automatically switch the keyboard layout. Next, you will type the text in the correct language.

In simpler cases, the program changes the layout after several letters have been entered; in more complex cases, the word will change only after complete input, after pressing the space bar.

You can manually cancel switching the keyboard layout on the last word entered. Let's say there are some English words in the Russian text that the program wants to convert into Russian, or there is a typo. To do this, you will need to press the “Pause/Break” (Break) key. You can also highlight text and change the input language using this very useful key. In this case, the layout is also changed using the “Shift” + “Pause/Break” (Break) keys.

Remember this “magic” key, it will often help you out when entering text.

Pause/Break (Break) - using this key you can forcefully change the input language of the last word or selected text.

When entering abbreviations that do not follow the rules, errors in the alteration of these words are possible. You can disable abbreviation correction in the program settings. In the “General” section, in the “Advanced” tab, you can uncheck the box next to the “Correct abbreviations” item. However, this is not necessary, since if an abbreviation is entered incorrectly, you can press the “Pause/Break” key in order to correct this word.

Many laptops do not have a Pause/Break key. What should such users do?

Replacing the Break key with another key on a laptop

If your laptop does not have a “Pause/Break” key, then Yandex suggests using the “F11” key instead. You can select any other keys.

In Punto Switcher settings, go to the “Hot Keys” section. Select the action you want to change. In our case, this is a replacement for the “Break” key (Pause/Break). Click on the “Assign...” button.

In the “Select a key combination” window, activate the item opposite the input field, click in the field with the mouse button, and then press the desired key on the keyboard, or several keys at once. After that, click on the “OK” button, the key combinations will be changed.

Instead of the "Break" key, I chose the "F11" key.

As you can see in this image, I changed the "Break" key to "F11" in the Hotkey settings.

Changing case, transliteration, spell checking

To change the case, the program has the key combination “Alt” + “Pause/Break”. You will need to highlight the text and then press the given keyboard keys. As a result, all capital letters will become CAPITAL letters, and capital letters, on the contrary, will become capital letters.

To change transliteration, that is, to translate letters of Russian text into Latin letters, or vice versa, you can use the key combination “Alt” + “Scroll Lock”. For example, if you need to convert the word “thank you” into the word written in Latin letters “spasibo”.

Highlight the word or text you want, and then press that keyboard shortcut. The selected text will be written in Latin or Russian letters (if reverse transliteration is performed).

There are no rules for a unified Russian transliteration yet, so the text will be rewritten according to Yandex rules.

With Punto Switcher you can check spelling on the clipboard. To do this, click on the program icon in the notification area. In the context menu, first select “Clipboard”, and then “Check Spelling”.

Now you can paste text from the clipboard into a document, into your correspondence, or anywhere else.

Conclusions of the article

The free program Punto Switcher from Yandex automatically changes the keyboard layout, makes corrections in the typed text, performs autocorrection, transliteration, spell checking, and saves the typed data in a diary.

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. Today I want to continue the conversation about useful programs.

In fact, when working with website design, when adding new materials, we definitely use a number of auxiliary utilities - unnoticeable, but which have already become almost irreplaceable. For example, our today's hero is used to switch keyboard layouts and is called Punto Switcher. I won’t exaggerate if I say that the vast majority of RuNet users probably already have it.

Punto Switcher is a very convenient, simple and, importantly, reliable program that allows you to forget about how you actually switch the keyboard layout on your computer. But in addition to its main function, it also has a number of quite convenient functions, such as transliterating the contents of the clipboard, saving its history (the last 30 copies to the clipboard), forcing a keyboard layout change, autocorrect (you can assign frequently used words and phrases to hot keys) and much more.

Features of the free Punto Switcher program

Of course, most of the additional features of Punto Switcher are also available in other programs, but this utility is already installed on your computer and will be loaded along with the operating system anyway. Therefore, I personally find the set of features that it provides quite convenient, with the exception of the function of saving clipboard history. For this purpose, I use another program (Clipdiary), the capabilities of which will also be described at the end of this article.

So, Punto Switcher has always been a free program. Personally, I’ve been using it for about ten years and have become so accustomed to it that working on a computer without it not only causes me discomfort, but downright infuriates me and over time can drive me crazy. In general, I don’t quite understand why the great and terrible Melkosoft shouldn’t pre-install a similar feature in its operating system, because it’s very convenient not to bother with which keyboard layout you’re currently trying to type text in.

Some time ago the program development team Punto Switcher came under the wing of Yandex, who has since been tirelessly promoting it even on his own, and I think that Yandex has its own reason for this.

I won’t say that Bar is a bad addition, but Yandex’s interest here is obvious - to popularize its search and at the same time be able to collect statistics on user behavior on the sites they visit. Do you remember about and the associated new way of assessing the quality of content on a site? There are different Bars there and can be one of the sources of collecting this very data. But this in no way diminishes the merits of the Punto Switcher, and you can refuse to install an additional set. We have a democracy after all.

That. you can always download Punto Switcher absolutely free and at the same time, do not fear that a rootkit or Trojan may be introduced into a free utility, because it is not anyone who is responsible for this, but the “Runet mirror” itself. After installation, it will automatically be added to startup and will delight you with the appearance of the corresponding tray icon after each startup of the operating system.

That's it, now you can forget (forget) which hot keys on your computer were used to activate the keyboard layout switch. Punto will analyze the characters you enter on the fly and if such a combination of letters is statistically unlikely for the currently installed keyboard layout, then it will occur automatic switching even while you are typing word symbols.

Switching the layout will be accompanied by a sound signal, similar to carriage return on a typewriter. If, while typing a word, the Punto Switcher program fails to finally decide on the desired language, then it will definitely do so when you press the spacebar. She also makes mistakes, but quite rarely.

However, you always have the option to manually change the selected layout. To cancel an incorrect selection, simply press the key on the keyboard Pause/Break. True, this can only be done for the last word typed, until you have yet started typing the next one. This is somewhat inconvenient, but you can get used to it.

Probably, it is precisely because of the sometimes occurring errors when choosing a keyboard layout and the lack of knowledge of how this can be influenced that there are still haters of Punto Switcher who are prejudiced towards this program. But still she has many more fans. Therefore, let's try to go through its settings and consider the additional features that it provides us (besides switching layouts).

So, by default, Punto will launch automatically when the operating system boots and it will live in the tray (bottom right) in the form of an icon with a visual display of the typing language currently used. Therefore, you can deactivate the language bar that is displayed in Windows by default.

To access the Switcher settings, you need to right-click on the icon of this program and select “Settings” from the context menu:

There is nothing particularly interesting on the general settings tab:

True, at the bottom of the settings window you have the opportunity to assign your own hotkeys to manually switch keyboard layouts different from what you had selected in Windows. Personally, I haven’t used manual switching of layouts since I first installed Punto Switcher on my computer. It never occurred to me to uncheck “Auto switching”, because then why would I need this utility.

Clipboard Manager in Punto Switcher and Clipdiary

The only thing I changed was to remove the check mark from the “Show helpful tips” box. On the Advanced tab, you can check or uncheck the box "Monitor clipboard":

Punto Switcher has a so-called clipboard manager that can save the last thirty additions to it. If you check the box shown in the screenshot, the program will begin storing a stack of the thirty most recent copies to the buffer. You can access the contents of this manager in several ways:

By calling the clipboard manager in one way or another, you will see its contents:

That. to paste something previously saved into the buffer into the desired place, you need to place the mouse cursor in this place, call up the clipboard history view in Punto (it is best to set it first to a hotkey combination), find the line with the fragment you are interested in and click on it with the mouse. In general, everything is simple.

The Windows operating system clipboard itself stores data transferred to it directly in RAM and erases an old entry when a new one is added. This leads to two main disadvantages of the standard Windows tool:

inability to add several fragments to the clipboard at once
When the computer restarts or crashes, data from the standard clipboard is lost

In fact, when constantly working with texts, it is very often necessary to use the history of the clipboard. The add-on to Punto Switcher described just above solves these problems, but I personally think the stack of thirty values is too small, and there are not enough search functions for the buffer history.

Therefore, in addition to Punto Switcher, I also use a separate program. For personal, non-commercial use, this utility can be download for free. It will automatically register itself in autoload and all you have to do is set a hotkey combination in its settings to open a window with the history of the clipboard.

To do this, left-click on the Clipdiary icon with a yellow folder and select “File” - “Settings” from the top menu.

Now everything that you copy to the clipboard using ctrl+c and ctrl+x, as well as through the context menu, will be saved on your hard drive in the Clipdiary database. In the settings, you can set the number of stored records from the clipboard and, if necessary, clean the database:

In Clipdiary you can search through the history of the buffer and, what is not unimportant, everything that you now copy into it will be stored not in volatile memory, but on the hard drive. This once saved me from re-writing part of an article when an unexpected power surge forced the computer to reboot.

Transliteration in Punto Switcher, case change and autocorrect

But let's return to Punto Switcher. So, as you can see, in its settings it is possible to attach quite a lot of actions to hotkeys, except for showing the clipboard history, which we have already discussed in detail.

I still really like it and I use it all the time - auto-correct option:

You assign a key combination and paste any text, code, etc. onto it. I personally use autocorrect quite actively and I have many combinations configured in Punto Switcher (for all occasions). For example, I can touch-type quite quickly (thanks to ), but only on the Russian keyboard layout. But I have troubles with the Latin alphabet.

Therefore, I preferred to assign all the terms in Latin, which I often use in many articles, to the autocorrect hotkeys in Punto (for example, the words Joomla, WordPress, VirtueMart, WebMoney, Html and others).

I am already almost blindly entering the given combinations to insert the desired word, while typing the same word in the Latin layout causes me some inconvenience (I need to rise from the lying position of the computer chair to the sitting position and begin the unusual process of searching for the necessary keys on the keyboard).

I also periodically add links to new publications in old articles that would be appropriate in the course of the story. Thus, I improve such an important promotion factor as internal linking. It is more convenient for me to make changes to texts in, because there is the possibility of rolling back. But notepad++ does not have a visual editor, and therefore, to insert a hyperlink, I would have to write its code every time according to all the rules of the Html language.

P.S. Now I have discovered the WebEdit plugin in Notepad++, which adds the buttons I need to the toolbar:

AutoCorrect in Punto Switcher allows you to automate this process by attaching the opening and closing Html tags of links to two hotkey combinations. To do this, you need to click the “Add” button in the settings (see the screenshot above) and enter the desired sequence of characters, which will then be replaced with the text or code fragment you need:

When you have configured all the autocorrect combinations you need, you can select in the Punto Switcher settings which button will be used to perform it. There are two options, of which the first one suits me best (Enter or Tab), because... Autocorrect by pressing the spacebar sometimes worked for me in the wrong place.

Now, based on our example, we can insert two letters X in a row “xx” in the text (or two “hch” in the Russian layout), and then press the “Tab” key on the keyboard.. In my opinion, this is very convenient. Yes, there are many programs that implement autocorrect, but you already have Punto Switcher installed and you don’t need to mess up the operating system with anything else.

Now let's go to the settings again and go to the "Hot Keys" tab. The most interesting things there seem to me to be the already assigned combinations in the first four lines:

I have already mentioned the first of them - this is canceling the erroneous switching of the layout using the “Pause/Break” key. Punto Switcher sometimes makes mistakes and if you notice this right away, you can press “Pause/Break” to change the layout of the last entered word. If you notice this later, you can highlight the desired word or words, and then press the hotkey combination "Shift+Pause/Break"— the layout of the highlighted words will change.

Sometimes it is necessary change the case of letters in a word to the opposite (for example, if you typed text with “Caps Look” turned on) and for this, Punto Switcher provides the “Alt+Pause/Break” hotkey combinations. You will need to select the entire word(s) or just a few problematic letters, and then press “Alt+Pause/Break” on the keyboard - the case of the selected letters will change to the opposite.

And, finally, another very convenient feature integrated into this utility, which I regularly use, is the ability to translate the language (i.e., not a direct translation, as, for example, in, but namely the replacement of Russian letters with Latin ones in sound). Transliteration is used to write Russian words in Latin letters. Why might this be necessary?

The whole point is that for search engines (in particular, Yandex), using transliteration in pages is a better option than using Russian characters or words in English. No, of course, transliteration will not give you a hundred points ahead, but it may be the last straw that allows you to get and stay in the Top of the search results. You should not neglect its use.

So, Punto Switcher allows you to instantly transliterate a selected fragment of Russian text. To do this, use a hotkey combination "Alt+Scroll/Lock". Fast and easy. Personally, I use this feature to transliterate the names of image files added to my blog content.

The fact is that optimizing images comes down not only to using the necessary ones, but it would also be advisable to use a transliteration of the same keys in the name of the image file.

In addition, you can use the possibility of instant transliteration using Punto Switcher in Joomla. The fact is that when activated, you will have to fill out the “Nickname” field yourself when writing articles. The contents of this field will be added to the Url address of the page with this article and to improve search engine optimization it is best to use transliteration.

That. you can copy the title of the article in the “Nickname” field, place a dash between the words and transliterate the entire text using Punto Switcher (“Alt+Scroll/Lock”). Although I personally prefer to use a component that does all this automatically, there are cases when using this component is either ineffective or not possible.

In general, you will probably need to use transliteration, change layout and register using Punto hotkeys. Of course, you can say that everything I described in this article is trifles and meaningless trifles.

But here it is necessary to make allowances for the fact that these little things from the Punto Switcher arsenal bring a slight simplification to the routine that any webmaster does every day. Believe me, you will feel relief immediately and for a long time you will remember the kind words of the authors of the program for such insignificant, but very trifles that make life easier.

Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site

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Key Features and Functions

automatic replacement of incorrectly typed text;
the ability to translate text from one layout to another using a keyboard shortcut;
takes up about 6-7 MB of RAM;
flexible configuration of all program functions using hot keys;
it is possible to clear formatting in the contents of the clipboard (Ctrl+Win+V);
the ability to save text typed on a computer in the Diary;
work with Yandex services.