Display language and translations
ForgeKairos shows its UI in the language you choose. English and Japanese ship with the
app. The UI text in the sources is English; translations are gettext PO files in the
repository's locales/ folder.
Choosing the language
Open Settings → General → Display Language, or set ui_language in settings.json:
{ "ui_language": "ja" }
| Value | Meaning |
|---|---|
"system" (default) | Follow the operating system's preferred languages. English when there is no translation for them. |
"en" | English (no translation). |
a BCP 47 tag such as "ja" or "pt-BR" | That language. |
Menus, settings and the command palette switch at once. Some other text, such as tab titles, switches after a restart.
What is translated
- Menus, the settings window, the command palette and panel text.
- Command palette entries are found by their translated name and by their English name.
- Descriptions of actions (shown in the keymap editor and in the hovers of the keymap and settings files) and descriptions in the settings file's JSON schema. In the keymap file, the arguments of the actions ForgeKairos adds are described in the display language; those of Zed's own actions stay English.
- Built-in snippets, such as the Mermaid diagrams offered in Markdown, have a copy per language.
Text that ForgeKairos sends to a language model (tool descriptions, system prompts, tool results) stays English, so the display language does not change what a model is told. Log messages are not translated.
Language fallback
A message falls back from the most specific tag to the base language, then to English:
pt-BR → pt → English. A message that is missing, empty or marked #, fuzzy shows the
next language in the chain.
Trying or adding a translation without rebuilding
Put PO files in <config directory>/locales/<tag>/. The config directory is:
| OS | Config directory |
|---|---|
| Windows | %APPDATA%\ForgeKairos |
| Linux | $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/forgekairos (~/.config/forgekairos when it is not set) |
| macOS | ~/.config/forgekairos |
Entries there override the bundled ones message by message, and a folder there can add a language that is not bundled. The files are read when ForgeKairos switches to the language; restart after editing them. Problems in the files are shown in a notification and written to the log; the readable entries are still used.
Remote hosts
On SSH, WSL and Docker remotes, text written by the remote server (such as some git errors and terminal notices) is translated on the remote with the catalogs built into the server, in the language sent when ForgeKairos connects. Files in your config directory do not reach the server. The server uses one language for all clients connected to it: the one that connected last.
Contributing a translation
The file layout, the PO header, placeholders, plurals, contexts and the i18n_tool
command-line tool are described in
locales/README.md.