He called it puntod — Punto Daemon.
It wasn't a dramatic break. No smashed hard drives or angry forum posts. Just a quiet Tuesday when he realized Windows had become a rented room, and he wanted a house he owned. He installed Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, chose a soothing dark theme, and felt a breath of freedom.
Alexei sat back. His heart was pounding. He typed "Rfr ltkf?" It became "Как дела?" He typed "Vj;yj" — it became "Можно" (Maybe). He typed a full sentence: "Gjcvjnhb rfr vj;yj ghjcnj gj xtnfr?" The script paused for half a second, then transformed it into: "Посмотри как можно просто по чинить?" (Look how easy it is to fix?)
The letters vanished. In their place, faster than a blink: "Привет." punto switcher linux
He laughed. A real, unhinged, 3 AM laugh.
"I know," Alexei said. "But it never corrects inside password fields. Look—"
Then a friend—a gray-bearded Arch user named Misha—told him the truth. He called it puntod — Punto Daemon
He tried fbxkb . It drew a tiny flag in his system tray, but the flag never changed automatically.
"That's not a script," Misha said slowly. "That's a companion."
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. Just a quiet Tuesday when he realized Windows
He had never written Rust before. But he knew that C would give him memory nightmares, Python was too slow for real-time key interception, and Rust had a library called evdev that could talk directly to the kernel's input subsystem.
Nothing happened.
Alexei was on X11. That was the good news.
"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."