Choose our own UI language

[iamshilov]

Thanks for localization, but can we have a choice?

[htcfreek]

You suggest what I think since a few weeks. 😂

[crutkas]

This is based on your OS. We could have an override setting.

[arjunbalgovind]

@crutkas This would most likely be a big work item, since right now we are relying on the default behavior for all 3 platforms (.NET, C++ and UWP). We would need to add custom logic for loading the resources in all the projects (unless there are some convenient APIs for all the platforms to switch languages).

[crutkas]

for .net / winrt, there should be. The C++ stuff ... that could be more interesting. Great call out

[NenoLoje]

If we were to change the thread's culture early in the start-up phase, wouldn't that solve the issue?

[htcfreek]

If we were to change the thread's culture early in the start-up phase, wouldn't that solve the issue?

You mean with restart for lang change?

[NenoLoje]

You mean with restart for lang change?

Yes, that's right.

[carlosmatioli]

This "Choose Language" feature would help me in the issue presented in the picture attached. The translated sentence in pt-BR is beyond window limits, and I cannot change the properties.

[enricogior]

@carlosmatioli
this issue is not about UI fixes for bugs caused by translation.
The problem you reported has already been fixed an it will be available in the next release
#7689

I will delete your comment and mine to keep this thread on topic.
Thank.

[Jay-o-Way]

This is really a good idea. Not only for personal use, but also handy when I want to make a screenshot to show on GitHub. My app is Dutch now and it would be better for other people when I can show something in English, or any language that fits.
Plenty of apps can do this on the spot, so no restart of any kind should be necessary.

[crutkas]

I think it is a good idea, just hard. Why: the front end techs are not unified. We use MFC, WPF, Winforms, UWP/WinUI, and i think one more.

Each UI framework would have to have a different solution == extremely time consuming until we unify

[crutkas]

Will be much easier once everything is in the same stack.

[erdostamasa]

So are there plans to solve this in the future?

[Jay-o-Way]

We use MFC, WPF, Winforms, UWP/WinUI, and i think one more.

I still can't wrap my head around this. It's very confusing and (I suppose) can't be very efficient. In my head GIT always has been the abbreviation for Get It Together. Something Microsoft can't seem to grasp.

[crutkas]

@erdostamasa I can see doing the work but I don’t a clear reason for why they would want this to not be their OS choice. This is future work as well and requires other work items to be done first.

@Jay-o-Way we inherited tech techs from other OSS projects. If they use let’s say MFC, for us to migrate is a big undertaking. We know where we want to go (WinUI) but it is missing unpackaged support. So at this time it means we can’t migrate. Upgrading from UI stacks also can introduce a host of bugs so doing it multiple times doesn’t make much sense when we know in the short term, we’ll get to where we need to be.

Rather spend the dev cycles in other parts of code.

we are a small team with great community support. Things take time.

[crutkas]

Jay, powertoys respects the OS language setting. This ask is to override that

[NenoLoje]

Jay, powertoys respects the OS language setting. This ask is to override that

@crutkas Hey Clint - what if we were to create a separate .exe file that would contain only the default (English) UI? Then customers could choose this one, or the current one (which defaults to the OS language setting)

@ALL - would that be sufficient?

[Jay-o-Way]

@NenoLoje Sorry, but that is not the way to achieve this.

[crutkas]

@NenoLoje we would not do that style solution, forcing language can be done but it is per UI framework and has other ramifications.

TLDR: Dragons be here so we need to be sure we're doing this correctly. Lots of testing and edge cases.

[prcdpr]

These are my regional/language settings:

Clearly my preferred display language is English for apps.

Some parts of PowerToys are shown in English:

However individual apps do not respect those settings and show in Polish:

This is not a FR but a bug, with PowerToys being inconsistent in some places.

I just want to clarify that the problem isn't really with need of having additional UI switch for localization but to respect the system settings everywhere in the application consistently.

No other apps have this problem with display language except for PowerToys.

[netprok]

You are closing other requests, because they are duplicate, but never do the main request! Please hurry up! It's 2024.

[DRYN07]

You are closing other requests, because they are duplicate, but never do the main request! Please hurry up! It's 2024.

I don't know why you are getting thumbs down, the option to change language should be pretty basic in my opinion. It is very very frustrating that it is not been implemented yet.

[andi0b]

I'm more and more wondering how feasible it would be to create a community build of power toys that just take the sources from here, remove all non-english translations and push a build to the store. After all it's MIT licensed, probably just the name would need to be changed.

It's a tragedy that such a great utility is available but practically unusable on international windows installations.

[JanVelas]

Just wanted to share this funny occurence I found while using the color picker today on my Czech OS PC.
"Krumpáč" means "Pickaxe" in Czech language 😄 ⛏️

Now I do wonder, what does it say for you?

[Aaron-Junker]

Just wanted to share this funny occurence I found while using the color picker today on my Czech OS PC. "Krumpáč" means "Pickaxe" in Czech language 😄 ⛏️

Now I do wonder, what does it say for you?

Corresponding issue: #31699

[Aaron-Junker]

I'm more and more wondering how feasible it would be to create a community build of power toys that just take the sources from here, remove all non-english translations....

@andi0b The main branch only contains the original strings. So building it from there will generate a version like you described. Regarding submitting a special version to the store, I doubt the store team would allow submitting basically the same app that already exists and it is also not worth the effort, as this issue is currently on our roadmap and will be fixed in the near future.

[andi0b]

@aron

as this issue is currently on our roadmap and will be fixed in the near future.

Great to hear, I can only see it being pushed from release to release. And this issue being open for a long time.

It just feels strange, that a show-stopper issue for the majority of the users is just pushed for such a long time. It feels like the core team doesn’t understand that the translated versions are nearly unusable. It’s really bad. And it could even be easily fixed by just removing the translations completely.

[Mario-Hofstaetter]

@aron

as this issue is currently on our roadmap and will be fixed in the near future.

Great to hear, I can only see it being pushed from release to release. And this issue being open for a long time.

It just feels strange, that a show-stopper issue for the majority of the users is just pushed for such a long time. It feels like the core team doesn’t understand that the translated versions are nearly unusable. It’s really bad. And it could even be easily fixed by just removing the translations completely.

Since I found this issue (which is just sad), I just tried to remove the translations by force (in my case German, I just want English texts...) and nuke all German language files.

• I deleted all folders named "de-DE", Powertoys launched but Settings where still German
• However it DID SUCCESSFULLY set Run / Powerlauncher to english for me. But not e.g. PowerRename (which has a PowerToys.PowerRename.pri), I have not tested all the other tools
• Then used file content search for a String, found PowerToys.Settings.pri , but after deleting it the Settings Dialog will no longer open (No Error Message)

I am not familiar with how .pri files work for language resources.
Is there any way to remove just one language from the file? If the OS language is not found, I assume it falls back do eng?
I would be ok with doing that again after each update until this is fixed in the future.

It is 2024 and more and more programs won't let you choose the language, especially Android Apps, but this is offtopic..

[andi0b]

@Aaron-Junker Is there an estimate when we can expect a de-localized version of powertoys? Otherwise it's maybe really time to set up a community build that just strips all the translations. It's such a shame this great tool is practically unusable for 95% of the users in the world, because of the broken translations.

[stefansjfw]

WindowsAppSDK 1.6 introduced what was needed for this. It was release few days ago. We will upgrade to it soon and then work on adding a setting to select a specific language

[kngfbng]

@stefansjfw Pardon my skepticism, but a language setting in Powertoys to me is like fusion powerplants and flying cars: It's always just around the corner, coming anytime now! 😂

I'll believe it when I see it and I can't wait to be converted.