The letters vanished. In their place, faster than a blink: "Привет."
Alexei pushed puntod to GitHub under the MIT license. He wrote a README, a Makefile, and a small script to install it on Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. He added a section: "Why this exists."
For three weeks, Alexei lived in harmony with the ghost. He wrapped the script in a systemd service. He mapped a hotkey (Super+F12) to toggle it on and off. He added a custom sound: a subtle pop instead of the Windows jingle. He even taught it new words—his own typing quirks, his slang, the way he always typed "Ghj,kt" for "Проблема" (Problem).
Then he switched to Linux.
Alexei tried to debug, but the errors were cryptic: XRecordBadContext , BadMatch , Xlib.error.BadAccess . He spent a weekend recompiling X11 libraries. He downgraded packages. He broke his display manager twice.
Then he tried to type.
Nothing happened.
He tried xxkb . It worked, but required manual toggling. No magic.
By day ten, Alexei had a text file called autoswitch_attempts.txt with 43 entries. Each one crossed out in red pen (figuratively—he used sed ).
He typed "Ghbdtn."
Then a friend—a gray-bearded Arch user named Misha—told him the truth.
"Because switching keyboard layouts manually is like having to think about breathing. Punto Switcher taught me that the best tools are invisible. They fix your mistakes before you know you made them. This is my love letter to that idea, translated into the language of Linux."
Alexei opened the script. Line 423: a regex that checked if the active window title contained words like "password," "login," "sudo," "passwd," "ssh," "gpg." If yes, the buffer froze. No corrections. No logging. punto switcher linux