Keyboard Shortcut to Switch Input Language on Mac

With two or more keyboard layouts installed, ⌃Space flips between your last two input sources and ⌃⌥Space cycles through the whole list. Both are on by default, both are changeable — and one of them famously collides with code editors.

The two default shortcuts

• ⌃Space — Select the previous input source. In practice: a toggle between the two layouts you use most, like English and Hindi.
• ⌃⌥Space — Select next source in Input menu. Cycles through every installed layout in order — the one to use when you juggle three or more.

Hold the shortcut rather than tapping it and macOS shows an on-screen picker under your pointer's attention: keep tapping Space while holding ⌃ to step through sources, release to commit. The menu bar's Input menu icon (the flag) updates instantly — that's your confirmation of what the keyboard will type next.

These shortcuts only exist when at least two input sources are installed. Add layouts in System Settings → Keyboard → Text Input → Input Sources → Edit… → +.

Change or disable the shortcuts

1. Open System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts…
2. Select Input Sources in the sidebar.
3. Double-click the current key combo and press your replacement — or untick a shortcut to disable it.

To undo experiments, the Restore Defaults button in the same window puts everything back to ⌃Space / ⌃⌥Space.

The Ctrl-Space collision

⌃Space is also the "trigger autocomplete" shortcut in a lot of developer tools — IntelliJ, Eclipse, some VS Code setups — and macOS intercepts it before the app sees it whenever the input-source shortcut is enabled. Symptom: autocomplete silently does nothing, or your layout flips mid-code. Pick a side:

• Keep ⌃Space for layouts and rebind the IDE's completion key inside the IDE.
• Keep ⌃Space for the IDE and move the input shortcut — ⌃⇧Space or ⌥⇧Space are comfortable and rarely taken. (Spotlight itself uses ⌘Space, so the two don't clash out of the box; they only collide if you've remapped one onto the other.)

Two more switching tricks

• The Globe key — on Apple keyboards, set System Settings → Keyboard → Press 🌐 key to → Change Input Source. One physical key, no chord. (The trade-off: you lose the Globe key's emoji-picker or dictation role.)
• Caps Lock switching — with certain source combinations (a Latin plus a non-Latin layout, like English + Devanagari or English + Pinyin), the Input Sources Edit… sheet offers Use the Caps Lock key to switch to and from the Latin layout. Tap to switch languages, hold for actual caps.

Let macOS switch for you

Two settings in the Input Sources Edit… sheet reduce how often you need the shortcut at all. Automatically switch to a document's input source makes macOS remember which layout you were using in each document and restore it when you return — invaluable when you write one language in your chat app and another in your editor. And if you'd rather see than remember, Show Input menu in menu bar keeps the current layout's flag visible at all times; a glance beats a test keystroke. For true per-app rules — this app always Hindi, that one always English — see the per-app input source guide linked below, which builds on the same settings.

If you hand the Globe key to input switching, you don't lose the emoji picker — it keeps its chord form at ⌃⌘Space, and dictation keeps whatever shortcut is set in the Keyboard pane. Reassigning the lone tap only reassigns the lone tap.

Wrong characters after switching?

If keys suddenly type the wrong symbols, you probably switched layouts without noticing — the shortcut works both ways. Here's how to fix a Mac keyboard typing wrong characters, starting with the Input menu check.