Punto Switcher – program for automatic keyboard switching
Punto Switcher is a program for automatically switching keyboard layouts. The program monitors the correct keyboard layout when typing on the computer, and, if necessary, automatically replaces the keyboard layout.
Many people are familiar with the situation when, when 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 in the Russian layout, but in fact he is typing this word “ghbdtn” in the English keyboard layout. The Punto Switcher program will recognize that the user has made a mistake and switch to the correct keyboard layout.
The main features of the free program Punto Switcher:
- automatic keyboard switching;
- autocorrect;
- fix selected text and clipboard text;
- sound design;
- switching keyboard layout using hotkeys;
- keeping 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 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.
Next, install the program on your computer. After the installation is completed, you can enter the program settings to familiarize yourself with its capabilities.
Punto Switcher Settings
It will be possible to 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.
This will open the “Punto Switcher Settings” window. The program settings are located in several sections:
- General – here you can set up general rules for the program.
- Hotkeys — you can set up hotkeys for more convenient program control.
- Switching rules – here you can configure the program in which cases it is necessary to switch the keyboard layout, and in which it is not necessary to do so.
- Exception programs – you can add to the list programs in which you will need to disable automatic keyboard layout switching.
- Troubleshooting – Here you can add some additional settings when problems occur.
- AutoCorrect – in this section you can set abbreviations that will be automatically replaced with full words.
- Sounds – here are the sound settings for the action 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 here , 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 the keyboard layout. The Punto Switcher program reacts to quick keystrokes in order to avoid conflict with the usual system shortcuts.
You can perform any actions using the Punto Switcher program using hot keys, or by enabling the necessary functions by clicking on the program icon from the notification area.
Here you can quickly change some program settings: enable or disable auto-switching, sound effects, in the clipboard you can: change the layout, transliterate, check spelling, view history, you can additionally enable diary keeping, view diary, create an autocorrect list, send selected text to Twitter, view system properties, convert numbers to text.
With the help of 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.
Fix typing errors in Punto Switcher
When typing words that have impossible combinations of letters in Russian or English, the Punto Switcher program will automatically switch the keyboard layout. Next, you will be typing in the correct language.
In simpler cases, the program changes the layout after a few letters entered, in more complex cases, the word will change only after the full input, after pressing the spacebar.
You can manually cancel the keyboard layout switch on the last word entered. Suppose there are some English words in the Russian text that the program wants to convert into Russian, or they made a typo. To do this, you will need to press the “Pause / Break” (Break) key. It will also be possible to 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 obey the rules, errors in rewriting these words are possible. You can disable the correction of abbreviations 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 don’t 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 choose any other keys.
In the settings of Punto Switcher, enter the “Hot Keys” section. Highlight the action you want to change. In our case, this is a replacement for the “Break” key (Pause / Break). Click the “Assign…” button.
In the “Select 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.
Case change, transliteration, spell check
To change the case of the program, there is a key combination “Alt” + “Pause / Break”. You will need to highlight the text and then press these keyboard keys. As a result, all uppercase letters will be CAPITAL, and capital letters, on the contrary, will be uppercase.
To change the transliteration, that is, to translate the letters of the Russian text into Latin letters, or vice versa, it will be possible to use the keyboard shortcut “Alt” + “Scroll Lock”. For example, if you need to change the word “thank you” into a word written in Latin letters “spasibo”.
Highlight the desired word or text, and then press this keyboard shortcut. The selected text will be written in Latin or Russian letters (if reverse transliteration is performed).
So far, there are no rules for a unified Russian transliteration, so the text will be rewritten according to Yandex rules.
With Punto Switcher you can check the spelling on the clipboard. To do this, click on the program icon in the notification area. In the context menu, first select the “Clipboard” item, and then the “Check Spelling” item.
Next, a spell check will be performed using the MS Word system. Upon completion of the check, you will receive a message stating that there is a grammatically corrected text in the clipboard.
Now you can paste the text from the clipboard into a document, into your correspondence, or anywhere else.
Article Conclusions
The free Punto Switcher program from Yandex automatically changes the keyboard layout, makes corrections in the typed text, autocorrects, transliterates, spell checks, saves the typed data in the diary.