Two New Apps I Wanted to Flag for You

Thursday, 23 June 2022

Last week I wrote about a change in MacOS 12.4 that upset many polyglots — as part of a company-wide effort to decouple national flags as icons to denote languages, the Input menu in MacOS now uses two letter codes instead (“US” for U.S. English, “GB” for British, etc.). As I wrote in an update to that post, the new policy does make sense for Apple — national flags carry political connotations that languages alone do not — but it’s unfortunate for users accustomed to scanning the menu for colorful icons at a glance when switching.

Two third-party developers have come to the rescue, with similar apps that restore the “pick a flag to change input sources” functionality:

Both apps serve the same fundamental purpose: they add a system-wide menu item that shows a flag icon to denote the current input language. Open the menu, and you can choose another input source language, as configured in the Keyboard panel in System Preferences.

Keyboard Switcheroo is a bit more polished. It lets you choose between the traditional flat flags, as previously used in the system’s built-in Input menu, the emojis for those flags (which are a bit larger and wavy instead of flat), or a custom image. Colorful Input Menu Flags only uses the emoji icons. Keyboard Switcheroo also lets you edit the languages shown in the menu directly within the app — no need to go to System Preferences.