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Preferences & Language

Language & internationalization

How to switch the language of Locus's interface, and what to expect from its translation coverage.

Locus can show its interface in more than one language. Menus, the command palette, tooltips, the Layers panel, and the in-app Help window all draw their text from translated catalogs rather than being hardcoded, so the whole app can switch between languages together.

Locus ships seven languages:

• English
• Español (Spanish)
• Deutsch (German)
• Français (French)
• Italiano (Italian)
• Türkçe (Turkish)
• Português (Portuguese)

There's also a QA "pseudo-language" the Locus team uses for testing - it isn't offered in the picker, since it's not meant for everyday use.

Choosing your language

1. Open Settings... from the app menu (or press ⌘, - Ctrl+, on Windows).
2. Find the Language row, in the General section, and open the dropdown.
3. Pick one of the seven languages.

There's no separate "System default" entry in the list - the dropdown always shows the language actually in effect, which is your system language on first launch (see below).

When you change the language, Locus reloads - both windows, if you're running Modeling and Nodes separately - so every menu, label, and tooltip rebuilds in the new language together. This is a deliberate, one-time refresh - not an error, and it does not cost you any work: your drawing comes back with the reload, unsaved changes included (see the note on Preferences).

How the default is chosen

If you haven't picked a language yourself, Locus follows your system language on first launch. If it doesn't have a translation for that language, it falls back to English. Once you make an explicit choice in Settings, that choice sticks until you change it.

What gets translated

When you switch languages, the change reaches the surfaces you interact with most:

• The menu bar and its items
• The command palette
• Tooltips on the toolbar
• Object-type labels in the Layers panel
• Dialogs and status messages
• The in-app Help window itself (see below)

Because these all draw from the same translated catalogs, they switch together rather than one at a time.

Help is localized too

The Help window (F1, or right-click a node/tool > Help) follows your language choice. Open it after switching to Español, Deutsch, Français, Italiano, Türkçe, or Português, and its pages, sidebar navigation, and search all come up in that language - including a small language selector inside the Help window itself.

New objects are named in your language as well. A circle comes out Cir1 in English and Kre1 in German, because the three-letter prefix is taken from that language's own word for the kind, and a boolean is named the same way, BUn1 against the German BVe1. Switching language leaves the names already in a file alone, so nothing that refers to them breaks; run Update Object Names from the command palette to bring an older file onto the current scheme, which restates the auto-generated names and keeps any you typed yourself. A prefix means the same kind of object in every language, so names from a file drawn in another language never collide with your own. See The Layers panel for how the scheme works.

If a specific Help page hasn't been translated yet, that page falls back to the English original rather than showing an error or a blank page - deep links from a right-click stay language-agnostic and resolve to whatever page exists in your language.

[!NOTE] Adding a new language is mostly a content task for the Locus team: the bulk of the work is translating the catalogs and the Help pages. It is not purely content, though. A new language also needs a row in the app's locale registry and an entry in the Help vendoring step, so it ships with a build rather than appearing on its own. The list of available languages may grow over time.

[!CAUTION] Confirm against the build Internationalization is an evolving system, and not every string in the app is translated yet. Some newer or less-common text may still appear in English regardless of your language choice. Confirm coverage against the version you're running.

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