The macOS accent picker you can configure.
A tiny menu bar app that puts á é í ñ ü ç ß one keystroke away, limited to the
languages you actually write in.
accented.app · Download for macOS · Report feedback
macOS already has an accent menu: hold a vowel and wait. In practice it is slow, it disappears entirely when key repeat is on, and it lists every diacritic for every language you ever enabled.
Accented replaces that flow with a global trigger and a picker that shows only the characters you use. Press the hotkey, pick, keep typing.
- Trigger. Double-press
⌘. A rebindable combo,⌥Spaceout of the box, works at the same time, and the double-press can be switched to⌥or turned off. - The picker appears at your caret. A small floating panel styled after the native accent popover, positioned at the text cursor, or near the mouse when the caret cannot be located.
- It reads context. If the character just before the caret is a base letter (
a,e,n,c, ...), the picker shows that letter's enabled variants and replaces it on selection: typea, hit the hotkey, pická. Otherwise it shows your full enabled set in one row and inserts the selection. - Select like the native menu. Number keys
1–9, arrows plusReturn, or a click.Escdismisses. Case follows the base character, soAgivesÁ.
Works in every app, with key repeat on, with no hold delay.
- Language presets. Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Catalan, Turkish, plus
an all-diacritics set. Enable one or several: the picker is the union. Spanish adds
¿ ¡, French addsœ æ, German addsß. - Per-character control. Switch off individual characters inside a preset, or add your own characters and symbols.
- Custom palettes. Build a named set of exactly the characters you want, say
á í ñ, and enable it like a language. - Ordering. Most-used-first, or fixed preset order.
- Triggers. Double-press
⌘(default),⌥, or off. The combo is recorded from any key chord you press; reserved system chords such as⌘Q,⌘W, and⌘Spaceare rejected.
Grab the signed, notarized disk image from accented.app/download,
or pick a version from release-archives/. Requires macOS 13 or later.
The app updates itself through Sparkle.
Accented needs the Accessibility permission to read the character before your caret, place the picker, and insert or replace text. A short onboarding flow explains this and requests it on first launch. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, and there is no network access outside the Sparkle update check.
If you decline, the app still works in a degraded mode: ⌥Space opens the picker, and the
selected character is copied to the clipboard with a toast instead of being typed for you.
The ⌘⌘ double-press is the one thing that needs the permission to fire at all, since it
watches modifier events through a global monitor.
Requires macOS 13+ and a Swift 6 toolchain. No Xcode project: this is a SwiftPM package with
a hand-assembled .app bundle, so Command Line Tools alone are enough.
git clone https://github.com/thatjuan/accented.git
cd accented
swift build # debug build
swift test # unit tests (Swift Testing, headless)
./Scripts/package.sh # release build + signed .app in dist/Scripts/package.sh signs with a Developer ID identity so that TCC permission grants survive
rebuilds. It is hard-coded to this project's identity; change SIGN_IDENTITY to your own to
build a signed copy locally, or run swift build -c release and launch the binary directly if
you only want to poke at it.
| Script | Does |
|---|---|
Scripts/package.sh |
Release build, hand-assembled bundle, Sparkle embed, Developer ID signing |
Scripts/notarize.sh |
The above, plus Apple notarization and stapling for the .app and a .dmg. Purely local, touches nothing remote |
Scripts/release.sh |
Version bump, notarize, EdDSA-signed appcast, publish to R2, deploy, commit |
Only the maintainer can run release.sh end to end: it needs the signing identity, notary
credentials, the Sparkle private key, and Cloudflare access.
Sources/Accented/
Hotkey/ Carbon RegisterEventHotKey + the double-tap modifier detector
Picker/ Floating NSPanel, layout, placement, session state
Catalog/ Language presets, character catalog, custom palettes
Insertion/ AX caret reader, insertion strategies, usage counts
Permissions/ Accessibility gating and onboarding
Settings/ SwiftUI settings window
Diagnostics/ Insertion-fidelity probes (hidden unless enabled)
Tests/ Swift Testing unit tests
Scripts/ Build, notarize, release
web/ accented.app site plus the Worker that fronts the Sparkle feed
docs/decisions/ Why the hotkey, updater, and hosting work the way they do
docs/spikes/ Measurements behind the text-insertion strategies
- Hotkey uses Carbon
RegisterEventHotKeyrather than a CGEvent tap, so it does not need its own input-monitoring grant. Seedocs/decisions/0001-carbon-hotkey.md. - Insertion has three measured paths: Unicode insert, backspace-then-insert for variant
replacement, and a clipboard fallback when Accessibility is off. Per-app quirks (Chromium,
Terminal, Notes, Word) are documented in
Sources/Accented/Insertion/DefaultInsertionEngine.swiftand measured indocs/spikes/insertion-fidelity.md. - Updates go through Sparkle 2 with an EdDSA-signed appcast served from Cloudflare R2. The
feed URL is a frozen contract, described in
web/README.md.
web/ holds the one-page site and a Cloudflare Worker that serves /appcast.xml,
/releases/*, and the /download redirect from R2.
cd web
npm install
npm run devIssues and pull requests are welcome. A few things worth knowing before you open one:
- Keep changes focused, and add a test when the behavior is testable without AX access. The catalog, hotkey, double-tap, and insertion-context logic are all pure and covered.
- Behavior that depends on Accessibility needs hand-testing across a few apps. Chromium, Terminal, and Word are the usual troublemakers.
- Decisions with long tails (hotkey mechanism, updater, hosting) live in
docs/decisions/. If you change one, update the record.
Accented is an independent app. Not affiliated with Apple.