IPAbet

A fast and memorable keyboard for typing the International Phonetic Alphabet.

IPAbet is an extended US keyboard: unshifted keys type plain US letters, digits, punctuation, while IPA symbols are typed as at most two keystrokes, using a grammatical mnemonic system based on shifted modifiers.

s ⇧H i ⇧H p    → ʃɪp
t ⇧H i ⇧H n ⇧G → θɪŋ
n ⇧J a         → ɲa
⌥e a           → á

ipabet.org — the full chart with audio, the keystroke reference, a browser scratchpad, and a typing course.

Install

Three steps everywhere: install, log out and back in, pick IPAbet from the input menu.

macOS — download IPAbet.pkg, run it, then add IPA under System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources. Uninstalling is sudo "/Library/Input Methods/IPAbet.app/Contents/Resources/uninstall.sh".

Windows — download IPAbet.msi and run it, then pick IPAbet from the language bar. The installer is not signed yet, so Windows warns on first run.

Linux — sudo apt install ./ipabet-ibus_*.deb, then pick IPAbet from the input menu. IBus is what GNOME, Ubuntu and Fedora already run, so there is no framework to install first; ipabet-fcitx5 is there for people already running fcitx5.

Building from source is one command per platform — cd macos && ./build.sh install, cd linux && ./build.sh install, or windows\package.ps1. See macos/README.md, linux/README.md and windows/README.md for the builds and install prefixes.

Every download carries a build provenance attestation naming the commit and workflow that produced it:

gh attestation verify IPAbet.msi --owner bikeshaving

How it works

• Shift + letter modifies the glyph before it, following spellings you already know rather than codes: s ⇧H → ʃ t ⇧R → ʈ n ⇧G → ŋ
• Digits are bases for the symbols with no Latin letter: 2 ⇧H → ʔ 3 ⇧H → ʕ 7 ⇧H → ħ 4 ⇧H → ɾ 5 ⇧H → ə
• Option is the diacritic layer, dead-key style like the US layout's own é/ñ: ⌥e a → á (combining marks are prefix) a ⌥; → aː (spacing marks are postfix)
• Escapes exist for everything the IPA layer claims: ⌃⇧+letter for a literal capital ("GitHub", not "Giθub"), Caps Lock for literal capitals.

The full official IPA chart is covered and notated at ipabet.org/chart. The complete mapping is at ipabet.org/keys and in spec/ipabet.json.

Repo

One notation, one implementation per platform.

• spec/ipabet.json — the canonical mapping. Source of truth for everything else.
• macos/ — the input method (Swift / InputMethodKit). The reference implementation.
• js/ — @b9g/ipabet, the engine in TypeScript. Its parity suite is the notation's executable spec.
• linux/ — two shells over one engine: IBus (what ships) and fcitx5.
• windows/ — the TSF text service.
• engine/ — the Rust crate linux/ and windows/ both link, through a C ABI.
• www/ — ipabet.org.

Planned, driven by the same spec and pinned to the js/ parity suite: ios/ and android/.

Releasing

main is always releasable and a tag only comes off a green main. Every gate runs on every push, so there is no release branch and no freeze.

The version lives in four files — windows/CMakeLists.txt, linux/ibus/CMakeLists.txt, linux/fcitx5/CMakeLists.txt, macos/Info.plist — and tools/check-version.sh fails if they disagree.

1. Bump all four in one commit. Push. Wait for green.
2. Tag v0.1.3. A suffix (v0.1.3-beta.1) makes it a prerelease, which GitHub keeps out of releases/latest.
3. CI builds both Windows installers and all four debs, attaches a provenance attestation to each, and stops at a draft. The Mac package is built by hand because notarization needs the keychain: cd macos && ./package.sh, then gh release upload <tag> macos/build/IPAbet.pkg.
4. Publish: gh release edit <tag> --draft=false.
5. Then deploy the site: cd www && npm run deploy. This order is not a preference — the download buttons resolve through releases/latest/download, so deploying first points them at a file that does not exist.

Three things no gate covers, so a human checks them before a non-prerelease: Wayland (synthetic input is exactly what it closes), macOS typing (a runner cannot grant accessibility consent), and typing on Windows on ARM (those runners will not yield the foreground).

Status

The standard IPA chart is complete — pulmonic and non-pulmonic consonants, all 28 vowels, ɧ, both tie bars, every diacritic and suprasegmental, and the Chao tone letters.

A contour tone is its level tones typed in order: the Chao letters ⌥3 ⌥5 → ˧˥ rising, and the combining tone accents fold into contour diacritics the same way (⌥e ⌥⇧e → ◌᷄ high rising).

Two gaps: extIPA (the extensions for disordered speech) has every diacritic of the 2015 set but none of its symbol letters (ʬ ʭ ʪ ʫ ʩ ꞎ ʞ); and bare g is U+0067 rather than U+0261 script ɡ, the price of the bare layer being plain US (g+⇧G types the exact U+0261).

License

MIT © 2026 Brian Kim