macOS 14 or later · menu-bar app
Orca IM Tracker draws one small rounded badge next to the mouse pointer — 拼, A, あ or 한 — so the current input source is always where you are already looking.
Coming to the Mac App Store · Apple silicon and Intel
Seven behaviours, all of them local to your Mac.
The badge is a pre-rendered bitmap moved by the GPU — a layer inside one static transparent window, never a window being dragged around. That single decision is why following the pointer costs a fraction of what a moving window would.
When the pointer rests and a key is pressed, the badge fades out and comes back on the next pointer movement. The app asks macOS only when a key was last pressed — never which key.
After the pointer has been still for a moment (1 s by default, 0–10 s in half-second steps in Settings, where 0 means never) the badge next to the pointer fades out and everything goes quiet: no timer is left behind to wake the CPU.
No Accessibility, no Input Monitoring, no Screen Recording. Every API used is public and needs no permission, so there is no prompt to explain to anyone.
The glyph is the same label the system's own input-source indicator uses, and the badge follows light and dark appearance on its own.
No Dock icon and no windows unless you open Settings. Launch at login is a single switch.
Switch to another app and a larger badge — 44 pt instead of 22 — appears in the centre of that app's window, so you know the input source before you type. It has its own display time (1 s by default, 0.5–10 s in Settings, no “never”), it never cancels the badge that follows the pointer, and both can be on screen at once. One window-geometry query per switch, no permission — and since macOS never says which window inside an app has focus, ⌘` between two windows of one app shows nothing.
This is the app running on a Mac: a close-up of the badge, and the whole Settings window.
CPU cost of the real build, measured on a MacBook Pro with an external 170 Hz display.
| Scenario | CPU |
|---|---|
| Pointer idle, app inactive | 0.00% |
| Pointer moving, ~31 events/s | 1.28% total · 0.20% in our code |
| Following at 170 Hz with fades and skipped commits | 0.03% net |
| Settings window open (app active) | ≈ 0.5% |
M3 Max, macOS 27.2, 170 Hz external display. The project README lists the full table, including the designs that were rejected for being heavier.
No. It reads the current input source through the public Text Input Source API and mouse positions through a global event monitor, which macOS delivers without any permission prompt. It also listens for foreground-app switches and asks macOS for the on-screen rectangles of other windows — the same public, permission-free API surface.
Nothing. There is no network code in the app — no telemetry, no crash reporting, no update check, no account.
Yes. It works with any input source macOS knows about. The glyph comes from the input method's own label, falling back to its name, so unusual or third-party IMEs still show something meaningful.
macOS 14 or later. The app is a universal binary, so it runs natively on Apple silicon and on Intel Macs.
No. macOS hands every app the geometry of on-screen windows without asking for permission — only window titles require Screen Recording, and this app never needs them. The trade-off is that the focused window inside an app is invisible to us, so ⌘` between two windows of the same app shows no badge; when an app has several windows, the front-most one is used.
Version 1.0.0 is built, signed and ready. The store listing needs a last few account-level steps, so this page will point at the App Store the moment it is live.
Questions, or want to try a build earlier? Write to kefroth@outlook.com
