What is lockime?

LockIME is a small macOS app that sits in your menu bar and keeps your keyboard input method from changing. On a Mac, you can have multiple input sources: for example, English and Chinese, or English and Japanese. Normally, some apps switch the active input source on their own, which can be disruptive if you want to stay in a specific language. LockIME watches for those switches and immediately reverts back to whichever input source you have locked. The locking can work in different ways. You can set a single global lock that applies everywhere, or you can configure per-app rules so that different programs each have their own locked input source. There is also an enhanced mode, gated behind an Accessibility permission, that lets you go even further and set rules per browser URL, useful if you want to type in Japanese on one website and English on another without manually switching. The app lives in the menu bar, so there is no separate window to manage. From the menu bar icon you can toggle locking on and off, see what input source is currently active, switch which one is locked, and view a 24-hour log of every switch that happened. Keyboard shortcuts are configurable for toggling the lock or cycling through your available input sources. The app supports nine languages and can switch between them without a restart. Installation is done through Homebrew with one command, or by downloading a disk image from the releases page. The app updates itself automatically through the Sparkle update framework. Because Macs with Apple silicon and Intel chips handle some low-level things differently, there are separate builds for each architecture: you download the one that matches your machine. LockIME is open source under the GPL-3.0 license and requires macOS 14 or later.