Chippy - Keyboard Sounds
Mechanical & typewriter sounds
Only for Mac
Free · In‑App Purchases
Mac
Eleven switch and typewriter profiles, built key by key. Your keys land in stereo, wide keys rattle, and the carriage comes home on Return.
hippy gives every Mac keyboard the sound of a mechanical one.
Type anywhere — in your editor, your browser, your terminal — and Chippy answers
from the menu bar with the switch you picked.
ELEVEN PROFILES, TWO FAMILIES
Six mechanical switches, from a creamy linear that stays out of the way to a
clicky jacket nobody in the room will miss, plus a deep foam-filled thock and a
whisper-quiet profile for shared spaces.
Five typewriters, each with its own weight: a heavy desk machine, a bright
portable, a dense electric, a felted quiet one — and Hickory, cut key by key
from a recording of a real machine.
BUILT LIKE THE REAL THING
Every profile carries four separate voices. Letters, modifiers, Return and the
spacebar all sound different, and the wide keys have their own stabiliser
rattle, because that is how a real board behaves.
Keys are panned by where they sit on the keyboard, so your left hand lands left
and your right hand lands right. Every stroke gets a small random shift in pitch
and level, so a held sentence never repeats itself. Releasing a key has its own
lighter click, and you decide how loud it is.
THE TYPEWRITERS GO FURTHER
On a typewriter, Return is not a key — it is the whole carriage going home, with
the lever, the ratchet and the stop. And the margin bell rings a few characters
before the edge of the paper, resetting on every return, exactly as it should.
Both can be switched off if you would rather they did not.
TUNED TO TASTE
Volume, release volume, pitch variation and stereo width, all live. Optional
mouse clicks. Key repeat stays silent by default, the way holding a real key
does. Watch a live keyboard light up with what Chippy hears, alongside your
typing speed and stroke count.
Lives in the menu bar. The Dock icon is optional. Opens at login if you want it
to, and it is a native app that stays out of the way of your battery.
SEVEN DAYS, THEN ONE PAYMENT
Everything is open for a week. After that Cashew keeps working for nothing at
all, and a single payment unlocks the other ten for good. No subscription, no
account, nothing to renew.
ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY
Chippy asks for no permissions at all. Not Accessibility, not Input Monitoring,
nothing — there is no permission prompt anywhere in the app.
It never receives your keystrokes, because it is never given any. macOS keeps a
running count of how many key events this login session has seen, and publishes
that count to any app. Chippy watches the number and plays a sound when it goes
up. It learns that a key moved and nothing else: never which key, never the
character, never the app you are typing in. Nothing is written to disk and
nothing leaves your Mac.
That is also why Return sounds like any other key here. The typewriters still
ring their margin bell, but the carriage stays where it is.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
The developer, Aleksandr Pavlov, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Aleksandr Pavlov
- Size
- 10.4 MB
- Category
- Utilities
- Compatibility
Requires macOS 15.0 or later.
- Mac
Requires macOS 15.0 or later.
- Mac
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- In-App Purchases
Yes
- Unlock every sound $1.99
- Copyright
- © 2026 Aleksandr Pavlov