Lang Switcher exclusions: games and programs that need the hotkey themselves

What they’re for

• Games with anti-cheat protection, and programs that read the keyboard directly, bypassing Windows. Such programs may reject the replaced text, and they have no use for a keyboard hook.
• Programs that need the hotkey themselves. Normally Lang Switcher takes the hotkey in every window. In an excluded program, Pause (or your hotkey) works as if Lang Switcher weren’t there.

How to add one: pick its window

1. Tray menu → “Settings…” → the “Exclusions” section.
2. Under “Automatically”, click “Pick a program window” and switch to the program within 5 seconds. The button counts down: “Switch to the program you need… 5”. Click it again to cancel.
3. The program’s process name goes into the list and is selected, and “Added: …” appears under the button. If the program is already in the list, you’ll see “Already in the list: …”, and if you didn’t switch anywhere, “No window picked”.
4. Go back to the settings window and click “OK” or “Apply”, and the exclusion takes effect. “Cancel” undoes an exclusion added this way, too.

Lang Switcher takes only the process file name. It doesn’t read the window title, which can hold the name of a document or an email.

How to add one by hand

Under “Manually”, type the program’s process name (the name of its file, such as game.exe) in the field. Click “Add”, then “OK”.

• Include .exe: game.exe, not game.
• The path doesn’t matter: if you type C:\Games\game.exe, the program keeps just game.exe. Upper and lower case don’t matter, and neither do spaces at either end.
• A name that’s already in the list isn’t added twice: the field just clears.
• A path without a file name (C:\) isn’t accepted: you hear a dull thud, and the text stays in the field.

How to remove one

Clicking a line in the list selects it or clears the selection. Select one or more programs, click “Remove”, then “OK”.

The list holds up to 32 programs. At 32, the field, “Add” and “Pick a program window” are grayed out until you remove something.

Microsoft Store apps

Windows shows Calculator, Settings and other Microsoft Store apps inside a shared frame, the ApplicationFrameHost.exe process. “Pick a program window” takes the app’s own process, such as CalculatorApp.exe, and the program uses that same process to decide whether a window is excluded, so excluding one such app doesn’t exclude the others. If you type ApplicationFrameHost.exe by hand, you exclude them all at once.

What changes in an excluded program

• Nothing you type is remembered, so there’s nothing to fix there.
• The hotkey goes to the program: the press and the release pass through untouched, the word isn’t converted, and there’s no sound.
• A double Shift doesn’t work there.
• In the first few dozen milliseconds after you switch to such a program, a press can still be caught, with the refusal sound: the program doesn’t know right away which window you’re in.

In the settings file

The [exclusions] section of %APPDATA%\Lang_Switcher\config.toml:

[exclusions]
processes = ["game.exe", "CalculatorApp.exe"]

Edit the file while the program isn’t running; the details are in The settings file. When you move to a new computer, the list goes along with the file.