Languages

🌍 Languages

PiCode comes in English and 13 other languages:

Čeština	Deutsch	Español
Français	Italiano	日本語
한국어	Polski	Português (Brasil)
Русский	Türkçe	简体中文
繁體中文

🧾 What is translated

Four surfaces, each with its own set of translations, and all four are checked for every language:

Surface	What it holds
The editor	Every sentence PiCode adds or rewrites in the editor itself
The setup window	The whole first-run setup
What PiCode says while it works	Messages, panels and tooltips from the built-in connector
The Command Palette	The titles of PiCode's commands

The rest of the editor's text — VS Code's own menus and messages — comes from Microsoft's language pack, as in any VS Code. PiCode mixes its own translations over it, so one language covers both.

🪄 How the editor gets your language

The setup runs before the editor exists, and an editor's language is fixed when the program starts, so it cannot be switched live. The setup gets everything ready instead:

1. The setup opens in your computer's language (it asks the system, not the browser, which would answer with the editor's own English). The language list has a flag for each one, and you can change it.
2. While you go through the steps, it downloads Microsoft's language pack for that language from Open VSX.
3. After the first setup, the editor installs the pack and switches to the language, restarting once. That is the only time it restarts by itself.
4. If you open the setup again later, the editor installs the pack and offers the switch with VS Code's usual prompt (Change Language and Restart) instead.

The final step of the setup mentions the language only while something is left to do: the pack is ready, or it could not be downloaded.

🔁 Changing the language later

Command Palette → Configure Display Language, pick one and restart. Any of the 13 works, and so does English.

🩺 It did not switch

• No network during the setup: the pack could not be downloaded. The setup says so in its last step, and the editor opens in English. Use Configure Display Language once you are online.
• The editor opened in English although your computer is in another language: only the 13 above are prepared by the setup; for any other, install Microsoft's language pack from the Extensions view.
• Text that stays English in a translated editor is almost always a message that is not PiCode's own; open an issue with a screenshot.

🛠️ For contributors

• Product text is written in English in the code; translations are files, never edited by hand.
• node build/l10n.mjs check runs in CI and fails when a language is missing a phrase, loses a {0} placeholder, or a bundle is stale.
• The tool extracts the sentences from the code, hands out what a language is missing in chunks, and merges the translated chunks back.
• The full process, the rules and the reason behind each are in docs/IDIOMAS.md (Spanish).

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