Ukrainian Keyboard on a Mac: the Apostrophe, and Where Щ Went

You added a Ukrainian keyboard to your Mac and something is wrong with it. Either the apostrophe is not where you expect and you have been switching input source for it — for a character that appears in ordinary words like ім’я and п’ять — or a letter is simply not there. Usually Щ.

If you want the whole of it — which of the three you are on, where each one puts the apostrophe, why an apostrophe that looks identical on screen is really four different characters that software does not always treat as equal, and which of the three is worth learning — the rest of this page is that. And when you have chosen, Mochi Type teaches Ukrainian touch typing, apostrophe included.

Three layouts, and two of them have swapped names

Three names in the input-source list, and they are less different than they look. Two of them are the same Cyrillic arrangement in two versions — an older Apple one, and one that carries the punctuation of the Ukrainian keyboard on Windows and Linux. The third is a different idea altogether: every letter sits on the Latin key that sounds like it.

Name in the list	Identifier	What it is
Ukrainian	com.apple.keylayout.Ukrainian-PC	ЙЦУКЕН with the Windows / Linux punctuation
Ukrainian – Legacy	com.apple.keylayout.Ukrainian	the older Apple ЙЦУКЕН arrangement
Ukrainian – QWERTY	com.apple.keylayout.Ukrainian-QWERTY	phonetic — letters on the Latin key that sounds like them

Want to check the names yourself? They are not from a screenshot. They are the English entries in the system’s own name table, /System/Library/Keyboard Layouts/AppleKeyboardLayouts.bundle/Contents/Resources/InfoPlist.loctable, read on macOS 26.6.

Read the first two rows twice. The layout displayed today as plain Ukrainian is the PC one. The old Apple arrangement, which used to hold that name, is now Ukrainian – Legacy. A forum answer written before the change that says “Ukrainian” means the other thing. Only the QWERTY entry still matches what the older threads call it. I could not establish which macOS release moved the names, so treat any dated advice containing them as ambiguous rather than wrong.

The separator is an en dash, U+2013, not a hyphen. That only matters when you type “Ukrainian - QWERTY” into a search field and get nothing back.

Щ is not missing. It is under Option.

Nothing has been taken off your keyboard. A phonetic layout has to fit 33 Ukrainian letters onto 26 Latin keys, so three of them sit one layer down, reached by holding Option — and Щ is one of the three. That is the whole of the problem.

On 27 June 2023 someone opened a thread on Apple Support Communities titled “Ukrainian QWERTY layout on MacOS Ventura is missing letter Щ” and asked when Apple would fix it. It got five replies. The answer is one keystroke, and it is not a workaround — it is where Apple put the letter.

Ukrainian – QWERTY is the only Ukrainian layout on which a letter is reachable only through Option. There are exactly three of them:

Letter	Press	On a US-labelled key
щ / Щ	Option + ш / Option+Shift + ш	Option+W / Option+Shift+W
ї / Ї	Option + і / Option+Shift + і	Option+I / Option+Shift+I
ґ / Ґ	Option + г / Option+Shift + г	Option+G / Option+Shift+G

Every one of those three sits on the Option layer of the letter it is built from — щ under ш, ї under і, ґ under г. That is a consistent rule rather than three arbitrary placements, which makes it learnable, and it is forced by the layout’s own premise: a phonetic layout wants every letter on the Latin key that sounds like it, and there are only 26 of those for 33 letters. The two ЙЦУКЕН layouts dodge the problem by spilling letters onto the punctuation keys instead.

On the other two layouts the problem never arises. I read all 33 letters of the Ukrainian alphabet out of macOS 26.6 with UCKeyTranslate against Ukrainian and Ukrainian – Legacy: on both, every letter is one unshifted key — no Shift, no Option, nothing held down. If a letter looks missing on your Mac, you are on the phonetic layout.

Those two do hang the odd letter off Option as well — Ukrainian repeats ґ on Option+U and и on Option+B, Legacy repeats и on Option+B — but every one of those is a duplicate of a key you can already press on its own. Nothing is stranded there.

The apostrophe is four different characters

There is more than one apostrophe. On screen they are all but identical — a small mark at the same height — but your Mac counts them as separate characters, and it does not treat all of them as interchangeable. That is why a word you can plainly see can refuse to come back from a search, and why the apostrophe you typed can quietly turn into a different one as you type.

This is the part worth carrying away, because it explains a class of problems that look unrelated to each other.

Character	Codepoint	Unicode name	Category
ʼ	U+02BC	MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE	Lm — a letter
’	U+0027	APOSTROPHE	Po — punctuation
’	U+2019	RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK	Pf — punctuation
‘	U+2018	LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK	Pi — punctuation

All four get used for the Ukrainian apostrophe in the wild. Only one of them is what your layout actually produces, and which one depends on the layout:

Layout	Apostrophe key	Character it types	Shift on that key
Ukrainian	the \ key — unshifted	ʼ U+02BC	₴ hryvnia sign
Ukrainian – QWERTY	the ' key — unshifted	ʼ U+02BC	₴ hryvnia sign
Ukrainian – Legacy	the ` key — unshifted	’ U+0027	~

Key names in that table are the US QWERTY labels — the physical key, not what it prints in Ukrainian.

No Ukrainian layout asks you to leave it for the apostrophe. If you have been switching to a Latin or symbols input source to type one, you are pressing the wrong key on the right keyboard.

The frustration is well documented, though the loudest thread about it is not a Mac thread. A June 2022 request — filed under iPhone, eight replies, eleven “Me Too” votes — asks Apple to add an apostrophe to the Ukrainian keyboard: “In Ukrainian language usage of apostrophe is pretty often. And it’s quite uncomfortable to switch for symbols keyboard for it every time.” That is a complaint about the on-screen keyboard. On a Mac the character is already on the layout, on a key of its own, and the paragraph above says which one.

Where that \ key physically sits depends on your MacBook’s shape rather than on the layout. On an ANSI board — the wide Return — it is the last key of the top letter row, past ]. On an ISO board — the tall Return — it is on the home row immediately left of Return. Right little finger either way.

The consequence of four characters is that text typed on one layout does not match text typed on another. Want to see what software makes of them? On macOS 26.6 I compared ім'я, ім’я and імʼя with a localized, case- and diacritic-insensitive comparison in the uk_UA locale. The straight and curly forms fold together. Neither folds with U+02BC:

'  U+0027  vs  ’  U+2019   →  equal
'  U+0027  vs  ʼ  U+02BC   →  not equal
’  U+2019  vs  ʼ  U+02BC   →  not equal

That is not a quirk of one API. U+02BC is categorised as a modifier letter; the other two are punctuation, which is why collation is willing to treat them as variants of each other and not as variants of it. Practically: a Find in a document, a database lookup, a filename search — any of them can miss a word that looks identical on screen.

There is a second mover in the same space. macOS’s own Smart Quotes substitution (Edit ▸ Substitutions ▸ Smart Quotes in a standard text menu) converts a straight apostrophe to the curly one as you type in apps that leave it on. Which apps leave it on I did not test. If you want the character to survive exactly as you typed it, that toggle is the first thing to check.

Which one to learn

If you are starting from nothing, learn the one called simply Ukrainian. The reason is not the letters — it is the punctuation, and whether what you learn here still works when you sit down at a PC.

The same three-way split as Russian, and the same decision: Russian, Russian – PC or Russian – QWERTY on a Mac works through the punctuation argument in full, and it transfers to Ukrainian almost unchanged.

The short version for Ukrainian:

Ukrainian is the default answer, and the reason is the punctuation. Its digit row is a key-for-key match with the Windows Ukrainian layout: ! " № ; % : ? * ( ) on Shift+1 through Shift+0, and the full stop and comma on the /? key. I checked that against the key table of the Windows Ukrainian (Enhanced) layout, kbdur1, and against the default ua layout in xkeyboard-config; both agree, and macOS Ukrainian matches both. It also types the apostrophe as U+02BC on one unshifted key. Apple’s own naming now points at it.

Ukrainian – Legacy differs from it in two keys and the whole punctuation scheme. The apostrophe and ґ trade places — Legacy types the apostrophe on ` and ґ on \, Ukrainian does the reverse — and Legacy puts the full stop and comma on Shift+7 and Shift+6, with : on Shift+5 and ; on Shift+8. That scheme comes from Apple and stayed there — xkeyboard-config reproduces it only in a variant it explicitly names Ukrainian (macOS). Learn it only if you already type it.

One honest caveat on “transfers to Windows”, because it is not clean in either direction. The apostrophe key is the exception to the match above. Windows Ukrainian (Enhanced) puts a plain ASCII ' on the key left of 1, with ₴ on its Shift; the default ua layout in xkeyboard-config puts a plain ASCII ' on the same key, with ʼ U+02BC on its Shift. That key — the ` key on a US-labelled Mac — and that character are what macOS gives you on Legacy, not on Ukrainian. So you trade one key against the entire digit row. Take the digit row.

Ukrainian – QWERTY is the tourist’s layout. It is genuinely faster to pick up if you already touch-type Latin QWERTY, and it costs you three letters to the Option layer plus a set of key positions that exist nowhere else. If you will ever sit at a Ukrainian-labelled keyboard, you will pay that back.

Checking it on your own Mac

Input sources live in System Settings ▸ Keyboard ▸ Text Input ▸ Input Sources ▸ Edit… — those four labels are verbatim from the settings bundle on macOS 26.6.

Want to know which one you are on right now? The fastest discriminator needs no menus at all, and it is two keypresses in any text field. Neither key moves between an ANSI and an ISO Mac: Q is Q, and the slash stays immediately right of the full stop.

First press the Q key. It types я → you are on Ukrainian – QWERTY, the phonetic one, and that is where your Щ went. It types й → you are on one of the two ЙЦУКЕН layouts, and you need the second press.

Then press the / key, bottom row, right of the full stop. It types . → Ukrainian. It types / → Ukrainian – Legacy.

To see an Option layer rather than guess at it, turn on Show Input menu in menu bar in the same settings pane and open the Keyboard Viewer from that menu, then hold Option. On macOS 26.6 the Keyboard Viewer is not among the palette input sources the system reports, so I am not going to quote the exact wording of the menu item; the settings labels above are.

What Mochi Type does about the apostrophe and the missing Щ

A trainer that scores you against a fixed expected character will mark a Ukrainian apostrophe wrong roughly whenever the layout and the text disagree — which is most of the time, since word lists are usually stored with the ASCII ' and the layout produces ʼ. In plain terms: a course that tells you off for mistyping a word you typed perfectly.

Mochi Type does not do that. All four apostrophes count as the same character, so whichever one your layout physically types is correct against whichever one the text happens to hold. The key it tells you to press next is the cheapest one your layout actually has — which on the phonetic layout means it teaches Option+ш for щ, because that is the only way to reach the letter at all. All three Ukrainian layouts are in the app, and because it reads the physical key rather than the character, your Mac does not have to be set to any of them to practise one.

That is the whole of it. If you would rather not read another word about codepoints, you have what you need.

If you do want the mechanical version: Mochi Type treats U+02BC, U+0027, U+2019 and U+2018 as one equivalence family: whichever of the four your layout physically produces counts as correct for whichever of the four the text contains. It also points the next-key hint at the cheapest member of that family reachable on the current layout, so on Ukrainian the hint lands on the unshifted \ key — the layout’s own ʼ — rather than on Option+Shift+9, which is where that layout keeps the straight ASCII '. The same logic is what makes Option+ш the taught keystroke for щ on the phonetic layout — it is the only route to the character, so it is the route the hint shows.

All three layouts are there, as ЙЦУКЕН, ЙЦУКЕН (Legacy) and Ukrainian (Phonetic) — the same three arrangements macOS lists as Ukrainian, Ukrainian – Legacy and Ukrainian – QWERTY. The tables behind them are machine-extracted from macOS’s own keyboard layout files and re-checked against the live system, 48 layouts by 48 key codes by 4 modifier states. Because input is resolved from the key code, your Mac can stay on US QWERTY the whole time — which is its own guide.

The Ukrainian course is 11 letter-group stages plus the same 5 advanced stages every language gets, then a Final Test — Stage N of 17. Two details are worth naming because they are not accidents. Stage 10 is є ї щ and stage 11 is ф ґ: between them they hold every letter Ukrainian – QWERTY buries under Option, at the end, after the common letters are automatic.

The second is the first launch, and only the first launch — Mochi reads the input source you are on once, at install time, and never watches it again. Ukrainian starts you on the Ukrainian course on ЙЦУКЕН; Ukrainian – Legacy starts you on ЙЦУКЕН (Legacy). Ukrainian – QWERTY is not in that lookup table, so it falls through to the next signal, the Mac’s preferred language, and a Ukrainian-language Mac lands on the Ukrainian course on ЙЦУКЕН anyway. Either way speed shows in characters per minute rather than words, and every one of those choices is changeable afterwards.

One boundary worth naming on a page this full of macOS internals: Mochi Type is a typing tutor, not a system utility. It does not add a layout to your Mac, switch your input source or change any macOS setting. Nothing you type outside the app changes.

What Mochi Type does not have for Ukrainian

The apostrophe has no stage of its own in the Ukrainian course. Mochi drills the apostrophe as a stage only in languages whose grammar leans on it — English, French, Italian, Spanish — and Ukrainian’s Quotes stage is " and - instead. You meet the apostrophe in Practice, inside real words: 13 of the 984 entries in the Ukrainian 1k set contain one, and 653 of the 49,001 in the 50k set.

Ukrainian gets five word sets (200 / 1k / 5k / 10k / 50k) and five built-in books. It does not get a movie-quotes set, a book-quotes set or a misspelled-words set — those exist for 7, 7 and 10 languages respectively, and Ukrainian is in none of the three. The interface is localized into Ukrainian, which is one of five UI languages. The free tier is the first 5 stages of the course and the Top 200 word set; past that it is a $12.99 one-time unlock.

And the honest comparison: Ratatype keeps a free Ukrainian-for-Mac course that runs in a browser with no purchase at all. It does not answer either of the two questions on this page, but if what you want is a free Ukrainian typing course and nothing more, it is there.

If the question is still Ukrainian against Legacy, it is decided faster by hands than by tables: an evening on each, with your Mac still on US QWERTY, and the digit row will tell you itself.