Changelog

1.3.0 · August 30, 2026 · WinKeys is now WinKeyr

The app has been renamed. Nothing it does has changed: the same rules, the same keyboard, the same one-time license.

• WinKeys is now WinKeyr, in the app and everywhere it is published. The first time you open it, your rules, your language and your license key are carried over from WinKeys, so the app you get back is the one you set up.
• Moving over is a download, not an update, and it has to be done once by hand. An installed copy of WinKeys will not turn itself into WinKeyr and cannot be made to: macOS checks an update against the identity of the app already on your Mac, and a renamed app is a different identity to it, so the update is refused. Download WinKeyr, drag it to Applications, open it, then grant Accessibility once more in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility. That permission is tied to the app’s identity too, and it is the one step nothing can do for you. Then drag the old WinKeys to the Trash.
• If WinKeys opened at login, switch that back on. macOS holds the login-item registration against the old app, so it does not carry across any more than the Accessibility grant does. Turn Launch at login back on in WinKeyr’s settings; until you do, WinKeyr will tell you it is not registered as a login item.
• Your license key still works exactly as it is. There is nothing to buy again and no new key to enter. Settings files exported by any earlier version still import, too.

1.2.1 — August 27, 2026 · Enter opens in Finder again, on macOS 27

macOS 27 moved Spotlight, and WinKeyr did not notice. If you are running the beta, this update puts it right.

• Fixed: Enter stopped launching things from Spotlight again, on macOS 27. With “Enter opens in Finder” switched on, searching in Spotlight and pressing Return did nothing at all — the same fault 1.2.0 fixed, back again on the newer system. Spotlight never comes to the front when it opens: it floats above whatever was already there and quietly takes the keyboard, and what is already there is Finder for every search started from the desktop or a Finder window. So WinKeyr has to check whether a Spotlight panel is up before it treats Enter as a Finder key. macOS 27 runs that panel as a different part of the system than every earlier version did, so the check was looking for something that is no longer there — and coming back “no panel”, which is precisely the answer that lets the Finder rules fire on what you are typing into Spotlight. WinKeyr now recognises the panel on macOS 27 as well as on earlier versions; the Finder rules stand down while it is up and come back the moment it closes.

Site update — August 24, 2026 · The icon on this site is the icon in your Dock

Website only; no change to the app.

• WinKeyr’ card on twoplus11.com was still blue. The app, this site and the icon that lands in your Dock moved to amber together; the card on the home page kept the blue WinKeyr used before it had a colour of its own, so the tile, the Download button, the FREE badge and the price line there were all advertising an app that does not look like that. The card is painted from the icon’s own two colours now.
• The privacy, terms and release-notes pages were a third palette again — a navy-into-brown tile beside the WinKeyr name, a dark blue keyboard outline inside it, and a blue icon in the browser tab. They were copied from the template before WinKeyr was amber and never repainted. All three now match the front page.
• The tile on the front page was one shade off its own icon. It ended on the accent rather than on the colour the icon’s key cap is actually drawn in. It is the icon’s colour everywhere now — tab icon, home-screen icon and page.

1.2.0 — August 23, 2026 · A way out from the keyboard, and an icon that stops pretending

WinKeyr rewrites your keyboard, and until now the only way to stop it was with the mouse. This release adds the keystroke that switches it off, and fixes the menu-bar item that had been claiming to remap keys at three moments when it was doing nothing at all.

• Ctrl+Alt+⌘+K switches WinKeyr off, from anywhere. Press it the moment something you typed does the wrong thing — no hunting for a small icon in a crowded menu bar, no clicking through to a toggle. It is named in the menu-bar menu and shown in Settings, so you meet it on an ordinary day rather than looking for it on a bad one, and you can switch it off if it collides with something you use. It only goes one way, and Settings says so: WinKeyr stops watching the keyboard completely when it is off, so nothing is listening to turn it back on — and turning it back on is not an emergency. It stays out of your excluded apps, too.
• Fixed: closing the Settings window quit WinKeyr. Open Settings, click the close button, and the app was gone — along with every shortcut it was remapping. ⌘+W and Esc did the same thing. Nothing said so: the window closing is what you asked for, the menu-bar icon going with it looks exactly like hiding the icon on purpose, and the first sign anything was wrong was a Ctrl+C that no longer copied. It had been this way since 1.0.0, and it took a user writing in to find it. Closing the Settings window now closes the Settings window.
• Fixed: Enter stopped launching apps from Spotlight. With “Enter opens in Finder” switched on, searching in Spotlight and pressing Return did nothing at all. Spotlight does not come to the front when it opens — it floats above whatever was already there and quietly takes the keyboard, and what is already there is Finder for every search started from the desktop or a Finder window. The three Finder-only rules now ask whether Finder is really receiving a keystroke rather than merely being the app in front, so they stand down while a Spotlight panel is up and come back the moment it closes.
• Fixed: the menu-bar icon said “on” while WinKeyr was doing nothing. It drew the lit key cap whenever the master switch was on — but a timed pause stops WinKeyr, an excluded app in front stops it, and macOS taking secure keyboard entry for a password field stops it. In all three the icon claimed otherwise and VoiceOver read out “Windows shortcuts on”. Those three, plus a missing permission, are between them every reason a shortcut does not work, so the one thing you glance at to ask is it on here? was answering a different question in exactly the moments you were asking. There is a fourth mark now for standing down, and the spoken name says which of the three it is — and, for an excluded app, which app.
• Fixed: the Settings status line said “Remapping 13 of 14 shortcut rules.” while a pause was counting down two lines below it. It read the master switch rather than what WinKeyr was actually doing.
• Fixed: an excluded app was called “Paused” in Settings. A pause ends by itself; an exclusion sits there until you take it off the list. The menu had this corrected a release ago and Settings kept the old word.
• Fixed: four sentences in the Settings window were English in all thirteen languages, with the translations reporting themselves complete. Three of them were filed under a spelling the app never asks for, so nothing ever found them. One is the reset confirmation — the sentence whose whole job is to tell you what you are about to lose, on the only action in WinKeyr that cannot be undone.

1.1.1 — August 20, 2026 · The menu-bar icon comes back

1.1.0 shipped a WinKeyr that started, remapped keys correctly, and put nothing on screen. If you installed it, this update fixes it — and WinKeyr checks for updates on its own, so it will offer itself even though there is no icon to click.

• The menu-bar icon never appeared. WinKeyr has no Dock icon and no menu bar of its own, so that one item is the entire interface — with it missing there was no way to reach Settings, no way to see or flip the master switch, and no way to configure exclusions. The app was running and remapping keys the whole time, which is the worst version of this: nothing to click, and no sign anything was wrong. The cause was a loop the app fed itself — the part of WinKeyr that decides whether the icon is showing kept re-announcing that decision, which made the app redraw, which made it announce again, so the icon never got a still moment to appear in. It now stays quiet when nothing has actually changed.
• The check that should have caught it could not see it. A menu-bar item cannot be drawn inside a test, so the guard on it could only confirm the right code had been written — which it had. The release now launches the finished app and looks in the menu bar for the item before anything can be published.

1.1.0 — August 20, 2026 · A language picker at last, and the keyboard spoken in your language

WinKeyr has shipped thirteen complete translations since 1.0.0. This release is mostly about making them reachable, and about the parts of the app they never touched.

• You can choose the language now. The thirteen translations were in the app from the start, but WinKeyr only ever followed macOS — so a Mac set to English could not read WinKeyr in Spanish even though the Spanish was already inside it. Settings has a picker: Auto — match macOS at the top, then each language named in itself. The windows switch immediately, with no relaunch.
• Most of Settings was in English whatever language you chose. Every rule’s name, what it does and what it costs; the status lines; the menu’s summary and countdown; the secure-input explanation. All of it reached the screen as finished text rather than as something to look up, so it was drawn exactly as written while thirteen complete tables sat unused in the app. It is translated now, and so are the menu-bar item’s own three states — which, for an app with no Dock icon and no menu bar, are the whole description of it available without opening anything.
• VoiceOver now reads the keys in the language you picked. WinKeyr is an app whose entire content is key names, and every one of them — Control, Option, Shift, Command, Return, Tab, Space, Backspace, Delete, Escape, Home, End, Page Up, Page Down and the four arrows — was spoken in English in the other twelve languages. The sentence around them was translated, which made it worse rather than better: a German user heard a German sentence with English keys inside it, and heard “Activity Monitor” while reading “Aktivitätsanzeige” on screen. The letter keys are deliberately still read as printed, because the legend on your own keyboard does not change language.
• The menu-bar icon can be hidden — for anyone who wants a remapper they never see. It took this long because hiding it takes away the entire interface, including the switch that would put it back: WinKeyr keeps running and keeps remapping every keystroke, with nothing on screen to reach it by. So the way back was built before the door. Opening WinKeyr again from your Applications folder brings the item straight back, the confirmation says exactly that before it disappears, and Reset All Settings restores it too.
• Seven more Windows shortcuts. Alt+← and Alt+→ go back and forward through a browser’s history and Finder’s folders. F5 reloads. Ctrl+Shift+V pastes without carrying the font and color along. Ctrl+Alt+Delete opens Force Quit Applications. Print Screen saves a picture of the screen and Shift+Print Screen draws a region. In Finder, Enter opens what is selected and Delete moves it to the Trash.
• Pause for a while. The menu bar can stand WinKeyr down for 5, 15 or 60 minutes and counts down to the second. It comes back on by itself, which a master switch does not — an app switched off by hand stays off, and the failure is silent, because a keymapper doing nothing looks exactly like one that is working until you press something.
• Export and import your settings. Every rule and the excluded-apps list, as one file you can carry to another Mac. The Accessibility grant is per-machine and never transfers, so setting up a second Mac already means a trip to System Settings; this is the rest of it. Importing replaces everything, so it asks first.
• WinKeyr says when macOS has stopped it. While any app asks for secure keyboard entry — a password field, or a terminal left at a sudo prompt — macOS stops delivering keystrokes to every app of this kind, and every rule stops with it. Nothing said so. The menu and the status line now report it and name the app that asked, rather than leaving an app that looks switched on and permitted and does nothing.
• Changed: “Leave Notes Alone” now reads “Always Leave Notes Alone”, because that is what it does. One click adds the app to the excluded list permanently. Sitting directly above Pause — which ends by itself and counts down while it does — the old wording read like the momentary version: you reached for “not for the next minute” and made a change you would rediscover weeks later with no memory of making it.
• Changed: “Reset All Settings…” says what it costs, leading with the count of switches you changed and apps you excluded rather than describing what a reset is. On a fresh install it is simply off, rather than looking destructive and doing nothing.
• Fixed: “Launch at login” told you what was true when WinKeyr started, not what is true now. Turning WinKeyr off in System Settings › General › Login Items left the switch on for the rest of the session — and because the switch’s own value decides which operation a click performs, a stale switch made the click do the opposite of what it offered. It is re-read continuously now. A change macOS refuses, or holds pending your approval, also used to look exactly like one it accepted; the switch snaps back to what macOS actually did, with a line saying why and where to fix it.
• Fixed: ⌘W and Esc close the Settings window. WinKeyr is a menu-bar agent with no menu bar of its own, so there was no File › Close for macOS to route ⌘W through, and Escape was the only way out without a mouse — which nothing said. Both work now. The key tester still wins ⌘W while it is listening, so you can ask WinKeyr what it does with it.
• Fixed: the key tester’s verdict was English in all thirteen languages — including “unchanged”, the word it prints for every key WinKeyr does not remap, which is most keys. So were all three settings-import failures, and the one button on the alert that carried them.
• Changed: WinKeyr takes the amber slot on the twoplus11 color wheel. It had shipped a hand-picked blue that belonged to no slot at all, with the icon, the app and this website each carrying their own copy of it. All three are generated from one source now. The “needs permission” warning was moved off the accent as part of that, and then moved again when the first fix landed it two and a half degrees from the color this fleet uses for errors — a caution that would have read as a failure.
• Corrected on this site: this page called per-app exclusion “for the moment”. It never was — it is the permanent list. The page now says what the menu item actually does, and points at Pause for the temporary one.
• WinKeyr sold business licenses and had nowhere to type one. The key button in the footer opened the checkout page and did nothing else, so anyone who had already paid was shown the shop again. The purchase email has always said “open WinKeyr, choose License…, paste the key, click Activate” — none of those three things existed. The footer’s key now opens a License panel: paste the key, name the computer so it is recognizable in your seat list, and click Activate. Nothing about WinKeyr is locked behind it — personal use is free, forever, and every feature works without a key; entering one registers this Mac against the license you bought.
• Removing a license hands the seat back. “Remove License…” tells the server to release this computer’s activation before it forgets the key locally, so the seat is immediately free for another Mac — which is what the purchase email means by “move a seat between machines any time”. The name you gave this computer is kept, so re-entering a key later does not add a second entry for the same machine to your seat list.
• The License panel keeps working offline: an activation is re-checked once a day, and if the license server cannot be reached the license stands for 72 hours before WinKeyr quietly falls back to the free tier and says the server is unreachable. It never calls a key invalid on evidence it does not have. A key that was rejected is always re-checked rather than cached, so freeing a seat or renewing takes effect the moment you look, instead of up to a day later.
• The panel reads in all thirteen languages WinKeyr ships, and is keyboard- and VoiceOver-operable: Escape closes it, Return activates, and the reason a key was refused is announced rather than only drawn.
• The footer has its Updates button back. The shared twoplus11 footer is meant to read License → Updates → Help → Review → Tip in every app in the fleet, and WinKeyr’s was missing Updates entirely — so the only way to check for a new version by hand was the menu bar.
• The footer’s Shortcuts button, and something for it to open. The shared twoplus11 footer is meant to end License → Updates → Help → Review → Tip → Shortcuts in every app, and WinKeyr had neither the button nor a panel — so its keyboard shortcuts were discoverable only by hunting through the menu bar, and the ones bound to invisible buttons were not discoverable at all. Every chord in the new panel is one WinKeyr actually answers, it reads in all thirteen languages, and VoiceOver speaks “Command Q” rather than the glyphs.

Site update — August 19, 2026 · A checksum for the download

Website only; no change to the app.

• The download page now publishes the SHA-256 of the WinKeyr.dmg it serves, so you can confirm the file you got is the file we put there. macOS already runs the check that matters — WinKeyr is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, and a copy altered after we signed it will not open — but there was no way to check a download by hand, which is what anyone installing it on more than their own Mac tends to want. The checksum is on the download section under SHA-256 checksum, next to the one command that compares it with your copy. It is published as a plain file too, at WinKeyr.dmg.sha256, in the format shasum -c reads.

Site update — August 17, 2026 · The other apps, after the sign-up

Website only; no change to the app.

• The list of the other twoplus11 Mac apps has moved to the bottom of the page, below the email sign-up rather than above it. It used to arrive while the page was still making its case for WinKeyr, so the last thing you read before being asked for your email was a wall of other apps. It sits at the end now — the page finishes on WinKeyr, and the list is there if you want to see what else there is.

Site update — August 17, 2026 · Saying that Ctrl+A selects all

Website only; no change to the app. Nothing here is new behavior — every shortcut below already worked. The page simply did not say so.

• Ctrl+A is now listed where a Windows user looks for it. The card describing the blanket Ctrl → Cmd rule gave five examples and Select All was not among them, which is an odd thing to leave out of the shortcut most people reach for first. It now names Ctrl+A, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+N, Ctrl+T, Ctrl+W, Ctrl+P, Ctrl+Q and Ctrl+B/I/U alongside the originals, and says plainly that the rule covers every letter and digit rather than a fixed list.
• “What do I lose?” read as though you lose Ctrl+A. It listed Ctrl+A among the macOS text bindings the rule costs you, without first saying that Ctrl+A becomes Select All. Read quickly, that looked like Select All was the casualty. The answer now leads with what you get and then explains what it displaces.
• Selecting with Shift was only half-described. Shift+Home and Shift+End select to the start and end of the line, and adding Ctrl extends that to the whole document. That has always worked; the Home and End card and the FAQ both mentioned Shift only for word selection.
• No change to the app.

Site update — August 14, 2026 · Headlines in one color

Website only; no change to the app.

• The headline no longer fades from one color into another across the letters. A gradient poured through text is the house style of every generated landing page on the web, and it was on the hero here, on the small uppercase label above each section, and on the license label in the purchase panel. The words are one solid color now — the accent this page already used everywhere else — so the headline finally matches the page under it.
• Gradients are kept where they belong — the buttons, the app tile and the rule above the support panel are untouched. It is only text that stopped fading.
• No change to the app.

Site update — August 12, 2026 · Readable buttons and small print

• The buttons in the header say what they say. The Tip and Download pills were drawing their label at 55% opacity over a colored fill, which measured as low as 1.6:1 against it — well under the 4.5:1 the accessibility guidelines ask for. Their labels are now solid, and the fill behind them is set a shade deeper so the text genuinely clears that bar.
• The Subscribe and Support buttons too. Their labels were colored for one end of a two-color gradient and disappeared into the other end. Both now use a single fill that the label is legible on all the way across.
• The newsletter note, the “More apps” caption and the version line under the download button were all set too faint to read comfortably; each is now above the AA threshold.
• Keyboard shortcut chips are legible against their own background.
• The screenshot viewer no longer makes every visit quietly re-download this page as if it were an image — a wasted request on each load.
• No change to the app.

Site update — August 11, 2026 · Clearer search results

• The description under this site in Google is no longer cut off. It ran past the length Google shows and broke mid-word; it now reads as a complete sentence.
• Sharing a link to the privacy, terms or changelog page now shows a proper preview card instead of a bare URL.
• The sitemap now reports when each page actually changed, so search engines re-check pages that have been updated instead of assuming they are stale.
• No change to the app.

1.0.1 — August 11, 2026 · Thirteen languages

WinKeyr now speaks the language your Mac does.

• Thirteen languages — German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Turkish and Simplified Chinese. WinKeyr follows whatever you have macOS set to; there is nothing to choose.
• Fixed several settings explanations that were assembled from pieces at build time. That made them impossible to translate — they would have stayed English in every language.

1.0.0 — August 11, 2026 · Initial public release

First release. Windows keyboard shortcuts on macOS — an event tap, not a driver, so there is nothing to approve at boot and quitting it puts you straight back to stock.

• Ctrl → Cmd, everywhere — Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+T and the rest do what they do on Windows.
• Ctrl+Y redoes, mapped onto macOS's Cmd+Shift+Z.
• Word navigation — Ctrl+← and Ctrl+→ jump a word; Ctrl+Backspace and Ctrl+Delete remove one.
• Home and End go to start / end of line. Add Ctrl for start / end of document.
• Alt+Tab switches apps — hold Alt to keep cycling, add Shift to go backwards. Alt+F4 closes the front window, F2 renames in Finder, Ctrl+Shift+Esc opens Activity Monitor.
• Windows scroll direction — separate switches for the mouse wheel and the trackpad, so a wheel can behave like Windows while the trackpad still scrolls like a phone. Both off by default.
• A key tester that doesn't lie — press any shortcut in Settings and see exactly what the app underneath would receive and which rule was responsible. Keys pressed in WinKeyr' own windows are never remapped, so it shows what you typed rather than what WinKeyr already made of it. When nothing happens it says why.
• Per-app exclusions — Terminal, iTerm2, Ghostty, Alacritty, kitty, WezTerm, Warp and Emacs ship excluded so Ctrl+C still interrupts. Leave <App> Alone in the menu bar stops remapping in whatever you are using right now.
• Menu bar only, no Dock icon. Every rule is individually switchable, and there is a master switch.
• Full keyboard control, VoiceOver labels, and a palette checked against WCAG 2.1 AA in light, dark and both Increase Contrast variants.
• Updates itself — WinKeyr checks for a new version once a week and can install it for you, or you can ask any time from Check for Updates… in the menu bar. Every update is signed, and one that isn't is refused.
• Signed and notarized by Apple — macOS 13+, Apple Silicon & Intel, one universal build.
• Free for personal use forever, including updates; optional one-time $5-per-device commercial license for commercial use.

Known trade-off for 1.0: the blanket Ctrl → Cmd rule costs you macOS's emacs bindings — Ctrl+A, Ctrl+E, Ctrl+K — everywhere WinKeyr is active. That is the deal Windows muscle memory asks for. Exclude an app to get them back there.