koter

Koter is a playful bash and zsh shell extension that forces you to type Linux commands, their subcommands, and their options entirely in Korean instead of English. If you type an English command like ls, it refuses to run it and shows a message telling you to use the Korean word instead. It currently ships 391 Korean translations, and the project deliberately avoids simple sound-alike transliterations, aiming instead for genuine, sometimes humorous Korean equivalents of terms like git, vim, sudo, or ssh.

The checking is thorough: it is not just the main command that must be in Korean, but also subcommands and flags in their correct positions, so you cannot bypass it by translating only part of a command. For example, running sudo apt install with any part left in English gets rejected step by step until every piece is in Korean.

You can try it instantly in your current terminal session without installing anything, by sourcing a script directly from a URL, and it disappears without a trace once you close the tab. For permanent use there is a one-line install script that downloads a file into a hidden folder in your home directory and adds a single source line to your shell's startup file, without creating any separate configuration file. Commands exist to temporarily switch back to English, switch back to Korean, or fully uninstall it.

The project is careful not to break your shell as a joke: it only intercepts commands you type directly, letting anything running inside pipes, your prompt, autocomplete, or sourced scripts pass through untouched, and it preserves any existing shell functions you had defined so switching back to English restores them exactly. Real filenames are also never translated. The dictionary and build scripts are included so contributors can add new commands, subcommands, options, and synonyms, with the build step rejecting duplicate Korean words automatically. It requires bash 4 or newer, or zsh, and has no other dependencies.