How to Change Language and RTL Layout

A clipboard shelf that only speaks English is a clipboard shelf that is harder to use for the roughly two-thirds of Windows users whose primary UI language is not English. Edge-Drop ships with around 30 language packs and automatically flips to a right-to-left layout for Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian. This guide covers how to change the UI language, how RTL layout works, what the system-default behaviour is, and what to do when the detected language is wrong. For neighbouring appearance settings see how to scale text size in Edge-Drop and how to turn sound effects off in Edge-Drop.

What "language" means here

Two separate things are at play:

• UI language — the language used for menu labels, button text, tooltips, and settings panel entries. Edge-Drop ships its UI in around 30 languages, sourced from community translations on the project's translation platform.
• Content language — the language of the text on individual clipboard items. Edge-Drop does not translate content; it stores and replays whatever was copied, in whatever script it was copied in. A shelf with Arabic UI can hold English, Japanese, and Russian text simultaneously.

UI language and content language are independent. The UI language is a setting; content language is whatever the user copies.

How to change the UI language

The setting lives in the Appearance tab of the settings panel:

1. Open Edge-Drop settings (tray icon → Settings, or Alt+C then the gear icon).
2. Go to the Appearance tab.
3. Find the "Language" dropdown.
4. Pick the desired language.
5. The shelf reloads immediately with the new language applied.

There is no restart required for a language change. The setting is persisted across restarts.

If the desired language is not in the dropdown, the language pack may not yet be complete on the translation platform. Edge-Drop only ships language packs that have reached a minimum completion threshold (typically 80% of UI strings translated) to avoid a half-translated experience. Users who want to contribute can do so via the project's GitHub repository.

System default versus explicit choice

The default behaviour on first launch is to follow the Windows system language. Edge-Drop reads the user's locale via the standard Windows API and picks the matching language pack. If no pack matches, it falls back to English.

Once the user explicitly picks a language in the Appearance tab, that choice overrides the system default. The override is sticky: changing the Windows system language later does not change Edge-Drop's UI language. To go back to following the system default, there is typically a "Use system language" option at the top of the dropdown.

The override is useful for:

• Bilingual users whose Windows UI is in one language but who prefer their utility apps in another.
• Users on a work machine where the IT-imposed Windows language is not their preferred language.
• Translators and language learners who switch UI language for practice.
• Users whose Windows display language pack is not installed but who want a different UI anyway.

How RTL layout works

When the UI language is set to Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, or another right-to-left script, Edge-Drop automatically flips the shelf layout. Specifically:

• The shelf's anchor edge mirrors. If the shelf is configured to stick to the right edge of the screen in an LTR language, it sticks to the left edge in an RTL language. This is because the "natural" reading-start edge for RTL is the left. See how to move the Edge-Drop shelf to the right edge for the manual override.
• Item text aligns right instead of left.
• Icons that imply direction (back, forward, expand) mirror.
• Tooltips open on the opposite side.
• The settings panel layout mirrors: tab labels on the right, content on the left.

The mirroring is automatic and follows the W3C's directionality guidance for bidirectional text. The user does not need to configure anything beyond picking an RTL language.

Content items themselves are not mirrored. An English text item on an Arabic UI still renders left-to-right within its row; the row's alignment within the shelf is right, but the text within the row flows naturally. This matches how Windows itself handles mixed-direction content.

What to do when the detected language is wrong

If Edge-Drop picks the wrong language on first launch:

1. Open the Appearance tab.
2. Pick the correct language from the dropdown.
3. Confirm the shelf reloads.

If the dropdown itself shows the wrong language names (e.g., showing English names when the system is in Japanese), the issue is usually that the Edge-Drop process inherited a different locale from the shell. Restarting Edge-Drop after confirming the Windows display language pack is installed usually resolves it.

If the RTL layout does not apply after selecting an RTL language:

1. Confirm the language is actually saved (close and reopen settings).
2. Restart Edge-Drop. The layout direction is computed at startup in some edge cases.
3. Check that the shelf is not pinned to a specific edge via the Position tab — if it is, the auto-mirror may not apply. See how to move the Edge-Drop shelf to the right edge.

Text rendering notes

A few rendering details matter for non-Latin scripts:

• Font fallback — Edge-Drop uses a system font stack that falls back to whatever the user has installed for the relevant script. CJK characters render via the system's CJK font; Arabic via the system's Arabic font; etc. No custom font is bundled, which keeps the install small but means rendering depends on the OS.
• Diacritics and combining marks — Hebrew, Arabic, and Indic scripts use combining marks that some fonts handle poorly. If a mark appears detached, switching the system font for that script is the fix; Edge-Drop does not override font selection per item.
• Cursive scripts — Arabic and other cursive scripts require ligature shaping. Edge-Drop relies on the OS text-shaping engine, which handles this correctly in modern Windows.
• Emoji — Emoji render in colour via the system's colour emoji font. They are stored as-is on the clipboard and replayed as-is.
• Bidirectional content — A single item with mixed LTR and RTL segments (e.g., an English URL inside an Arabic paragraph) is rendered using the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, which is the same algorithm Windows uses everywhere.

How text size interacts with language

Some scripts (CJK, Arabic) are denser per character than Latin. At the same font size, Arabic text takes more horizontal space than English. Edge-Drop's text size scaling — see how to scale text size in Edge-Drop — accounts for this by allowing the user to step down to Small or up to Large as needed for their script.

The size options are Small, Normal, Medium, and Large. Normal is the default; Large is recommended for users who find CJK or Arabic text cramped at Normal.

Failure modes

• Incomplete translation — if a language pack is at 80% completion, the remaining 20% of strings appear in English. This is intentional; a partially-translated UI is more useful than no translation.
• Outdated pack — when a new Edge-Drop version adds UI strings, the language packs need to catch up. New strings appear in English until the translators update the pack.
• Locale mismatch — the Windows user locale and the Windows display language can differ. Edge-Drop follows the display language, not the user locale, for the default UI language pick.
• IME composition — typing in an IME inside Edge-Drop's search box works the same as in any other app. The IME composition window follows the caret. No special configuration is needed.

What Edge-Drop does not claim

• Edge-Drop does not translate clipboard content. The UI language does not affect what is stored or replayed.
• Edge-Drop does not maintain its own font files. Rendering depends on the OS font stack.
• Edge-Drop does not ship every language in the world. The pack list reflects what the translation community has produced.
• Edge-Drop does not support custom user-supplied language packs. The pack list is fixed per release.

For the broader topic of multi-language clipboard workflows, see Win+V on multiple languages and IME keyboards and right-to-left text on the Windows clipboard.

Summary

Edge-Drop's UI language follows the Windows display language on first launch and can be overridden in the Appearance tab. Around 30 language packs are shipped. Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian automatically trigger a right-to-left shelf layout, including edge mirroring. Content language is independent of UI language — a shelf in any UI language can hold items in any script. For incomplete packs, the missing strings fall back to English, which is preferable to a half-translated experience. Pair the language choice with the text size scaling for the best readability in dense scripts.

Related reading

• How to Scale Text Size in Edge-Drop
• How Edge-Drop Updates on GitHub Builds
• How to Install Edge-Drop on Windows 10 and 11
• What Local-First Software Means for Clipboard Apps

Sources

• Microsoft Learn — Locale and language functions — official documentation for the Windows locale APIs Edge-Drop reads to determine the system default language
• W3C — Authoring HTML: Bidirectional text — the W3C guidance Edge-Drop follows for RTL layout mirroring and bidirectional text rendering
• Unicode — Bidirectional Algorithm (UAX #9) — the standard Edge-Drop relies on for rendering mixed LTR/RTL content
• Microsoft Learn — Multilingual User Interface (MUI) — documents the Windows display language versus user locale distinction that affects Edge-Drop's default language pick
• Electron — app.getLocale() — the Electron API Edge-Drop uses to read the system locale on startup

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