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 (macOS)

Download IPAbet.pkg and run the installer, then log out and back in (first install only) and add IPA under System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources.

Building from source is one command — cd macos && ./build.sh install — see macos/README.md for the build, the architecture, and the install prefixes.

Uninstalling is one command too: sudo "/Library/Input Methods/IPAbet.app/Contents/Resources/uninstall.sh", then log out and back in.

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.
• www/ — ipabet.org.

Planned, each driven by the same spec and pinned to the js/ parity suite: linux/ (IBus/fcitx), windows/ (TSF), ios/ and android/.

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