Layout Fix

Fixes text typed in the wrong keyboard layout, Punto-style: ghbdtn becomes привет, the layout switches, and you keep typing. It runs quietly in the background — no bar widget, no panel, nothing to click.

The layouts are whatever your compositor is configured with. They are read from niri and compiled through libxkbcommon at startup, so a us,ru setup and a de,ru one both work without touching the code, and the matching spell-check dictionaries are looked up for you.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	umedbazarov/layout-fix
Entries	Service: service

Requirements

• niri, with at least two keyboard layouts configured (xkb { layout "us,ru" }). Other compositors are not supported yet: the layout query and switch go through niri msg.

• Access to the keyboard devices. The correction daemon reads key presses from /dev/input, which requires membership in the input group:

  sudo usermod -aG input "$USER"    # then log out and back in
  

  The plugin checks this on startup and tells you if it is missing.

• python3 (standard library only) and wtype, required — the daemon and the retyping of a corrected word.

• bash, cp, chmod, setsid and pkill, required — installing, starting and stopping the daemon. All part of a base system.

• hunspell with a dictionary per layout, strongly recommended. Without dictionaries the plugin falls back to heuristics: safe, but it misses words. The plugin reports which dictionaries are missing, and can install them for you — see Dictionaries below.

Usage

Enable the plugin and it starts working: finish a word that was typed in the wrong layout, and it is rewritten as you type the next space.

Bind the manual actions in your niri config — useful when automatic mode is off, or when a correction was not wanted:

binds {
    // Re-encode what has been typed so far
    Mod+Shift+X { spawn "noctalia" "msg" "plugin" "umedbazarov/layout-fix:service" "all" "fix"; }
    // Undo the last automatic correction
    Mod+Shift+Z { spawn "noctalia" "msg" "plugin" "umedbazarov/layout-fix:service" "all" "undo"; }
    // Toggle automatic mode
    Mod+Shift+A { spawn "noctalia" "msg" "plugin" "umedbazarov/layout-fix:service" "all" "auto"; }
}

When it corrects, and when it does not

A word is judged once it is finished (a separator or Enter). It is corrected only when both are true: what is on screen is not a word of the current language, and its re-encoding is a word of the other one. That is why grep, systemctl, npm and ordinary English words survive untouched, while yjhvfkmyj becomes нормально.

Colloquial words are in no dictionary, so a re-encoding it does not list can still be corrected — but only when it is within a couple of edits of a word the dictionary suggests. максималка is the same letters as the suggestion макси малка and gets corrected; libgcrypt re-encodes to дшипскнзе, five edits from anything, and is left alone.

Separators are derived from the actual layout tables — only keys that produce a letter in no layout end a word. The Latin , key is the Russian letter б, so hf,jnftn is treated as one word (работает) rather than two.

Words shorter than three characters, and anything typed with Ctrl, are never touched. A short word is rewritten only in the company of a longer one: correcting vfrcbvfkrf in f vfrcbvfkrf takes the f with it, across single spaces and never over a word the dictionary knows, so the a of a docker stays as it is.

Dictionaries

The Dictionaries setting decides what happens when a dictionary for one of your layouts is missing:

• Tell me what to install (default) — a notification naming the dictionaries, e.g. ru, en.
• Install automatically — one pkexec pacman -S for the matching hunspell-* packages, asking for your password once.
• Do not check — stay on heuristics.

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
auto	bool	true	Correct a word as soon as it is finished. Off: only the keybindings correct.
dictionaries	select	notify	What to do about missing dictionaries: notify, install, or ignore.
hotkey_hint	bool	true	Show once how to bind the fix and undo actions — see below.

The hint is a single notification on the first start, and only for a config that does not already spawn this plugin's IPC: with no widget and no panel, it is the one place the manual actions can be mentioned at all. Having shown it once, the plugin remembers and stays quiet.

IPC

noctalia msg plugin umedbazarov/layout-fix:service all fix
noctalia msg plugin umedbazarov/layout-fix:service all undo
noctalia msg plugin umedbazarov/layout-fix:service all auto
noctalia msg plugin umedbazarov/layout-fix:service all status

status writes the daemon's state to the Noctalia log: layouts in use, dictionaries loaded, corrections made, and how many key presses were seen.

Privacy

This plugin reads your keyboard, so it is worth being precise about what that means.

• The daemon keeps a buffer of keycodes, capped at 120 characters, in memory only. It is never written to disk and never leaves the machine.
• The buffer is cleared on Enter, Tab and Escape, after 30 seconds of inactivity, and on any Ctrl chord.
• status reports the buffer's length, never its contents.
• Disabling the plugin stops the daemon; nothing keeps watching afterwards.
• The daemon is scripts/layout-fix: plain Python, standard library only, about 600 readable lines. Nothing is downloaded or executed from the network.

Passwords are the obvious concern: Wayland gives no reliable way to know that a field is a password field, so type passwords with automatic mode off if that worries you (Mod+Shift+A, or the auto setting).

Notes

• Commands spawned. niri msg keyboard-layouts and niri msg action switch-layout (layout state), wtype (erase and retype the corrected word), hunspell -a (one process per dictionary, fed single words), hunspell -D (which dictionaries exist), and pkexec pacman -S only if you choose automatic dictionary installation.
• Files written. ~/.config/layout-fix/config (one line: automatic mode on or off) and a copy of the daemon in the plugin's data directory. A unix socket in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, mode 0600, carries the commands.
• Layout tables come from libxkbcommon via ctypes — the same library the compositor uses, so the tables match your keymap exactly, including punctuation that differs between layouts.
• Tests: python3 tests/test-layout-fix.py builds the fixtures from your real keymap and reports correct decisions, false positives and misses. With us,ru and both dictionaries installed it is 50/50 with no false positives.

License

MIT.