Alexei opened the script. Line 423: a regex that checked if the active window title contained words like "password," "login," "sudo," "passwd," "ssh," "gpg." If yes, the buffer froze. No corrections. No logging.
"You're using X11," Misha said over encrypted IRC. "Punto Switcher on Windows hooks into the keyboard driver at a low level. On Linux, you have two worlds: X11 and Wayland. X11 is old and leaky but lets you spy on keys. Wayland is secure but hates you personally."
Alexei was on X11. That was the good news.
The ghost was home. End.
He opened a terminal, typed sudo followed by his password: "Ghj,bnm." The script saw the sudo command and went silent. The password stayed in English layout. The ghost knew when to hide.
The code was 847 lines of Python. It used python-xlib to hook into X11's record extension. It listened to every key press, every key release. It maintained a buffer of the last 30 characters. It had a dictionary of 4,000 common Russian words and their English typo equivalents.
Alexei tried it. It crashed when he opened Firefox. punto switcher linux
The bad news: "Punto Switcher for Linux doesn't exist because no one wants to write a keyboard sniffer that works across all desktop environments. GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXQt—they all handle input differently. It's like asking for a universal TV remote that works on a toaster."
On the final night, he typed "Ghbdtn mundo" — a mix of Russian typo and English. The daemon turned it into "Привет mundo." Perfect.
He tried xxkb . It worked, but required manual toggling. No magic. Alexei opened the script
He pressed Ctrl+Shift. Nothing. He pressed Alt+Shift. Nothing. He installed GNOME Tweaks, hunted through keyboard layouts, set Russian to "Phonetic." Still, the machine refused to read his mind. For the first time in a decade, Alexei had to manually switch layouts. It felt like walking without a cane after a stroke.
He tried keyboard-autoswitch , a Ruby gem that listened to X11 events. It worked for exactly three keystrokes before confusing "cat" with "собака" and locking his keyboard into a Cyrillic loop.