A Steam account switcher that protects your game settings.
Switch between your Steam accounts in one click — no passwords, no 2FA codes. And when you log into an account you share with someone else, SteamSwitch can carry your game config with you and put theirs back when you leave.
Windows and macOS. GPL-3.0. No telemetry, no update check, no account of any kind.
Status: early alpha — v0.1.0. Never run end to end on either OS.
This is a source snapshot, not a release. Every part of it — the switching engine, the Session Kit, the Dota config handling — is unit-tested, and the macOS backend is verified against a real Steam install's files and process table. What has not happened is a complete switch, on a real account, on either Windows or macOS. There are no binaries and no releases yet.
If you want to try it, build from source, read
TESTING.md, and don't point it at an account you couldn't log back into by hand.
SteamSwitch started life as a Steam-only fork of TcNo Account Switcher by TroubleChute — the inspiration and the original codebase for this project. It is not affiliated with or supported by that project, so please don't send SteamSwitch problems upstream. See Credits for attribution and
FORK.mdfor everything that differs.
The account switching itself is boring and safe. The Session Kit — the part that overwrites game config folders — is the part that can lose data if you don't know what it does.
- Close Steam and the game first. SteamSwitch refuses to write while either is running. That refusal is protecting you, not being awkward.
- Steam Cloud can undo a kit. Dota's
remote/folder (hero grids, item builds) is cloud-synced. SteamSwitch writes it, then Steam may pull the old copy back after the next login. The status line says "cloud may override grids" rather than claiming success. The only fully reliable mode is disabling Steam Cloud for that game on this PC. - "Keep mine on it" leaves your settings on someone else's account. They'll play with your keybinds until you restore. That's a social failure mode, not a technical one.
- Restoring gives back this PC's last saved setup — not everything the other person has ever had, and nothing from their other machines.
- If someone else played in the meantime, SteamSwitch stops. Live files that no longer match what it wrote mean somebody's work is at stake, so the default is no write and you get asked.
- Don't hand-delete the data folder to "fix" a stuck switch. Use the recovery prompt — it's the only thing that knows which files were moved where.
- Antivirus and Controlled Folder Access can block it. SteamSwitch needs write access to
Steam's
userdatafolder and to its own data folder.
Steam remembers your last login in loginusers.vdf, a couple of registry values under
HKCU\Software\Valve\Steam, and config.vdf. SteamSwitch saves those per account while Steam
is closed, and swaps them back in when you pick a different account. It never sees or stores a
password, and 2FA is untouched because Steam still considers the machine already authorised —
the machine-auth token is one of the files being swapped.
What it isn't: not a cheat, not a VAC bypass, not a credential manager, not a bot, not a multi-platform launcher, and not a backup product.
Three roles, set from an account's right-click menu:
| Role | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Home | Your main account, one per PC. Your kit is taken from here. |
| Shared | An account someone else also uses. Your kit travels here. |
| (neither) | An ordinary alt. Plain switch, nothing is copied. |
- Close Steam.
- Save their setup — snapshot the shared account's Dota config, hashed file by file.
- Apply my kit — copy Home's config onto it, staged and verified.
- Swap the login and relaunch Steam.
The status strip narrates each step, then sits on "Your kit is active on X" until you leave.
You're asked every time:
Restore X's setup? [ Restore theirs ] [ Keep mine on it ]
"Restore theirs" is the default. "Keep mine" leaves your config in place and keeps tracking it, so you can still restore later.
Every mutation is written to a transaction journal on disk before it happens. If SteamSwitch is killed mid-switch — crash, power cut, Task Manager — the next launch blocks switching and shows what was interrupted, offering to restore, keep what's on disk, or discard.
Files are replaced by staging a copy on the same drive and renaming it into place, keeping the displaced copy until the transaction commits. There is no point at which the destination is simply deleted.
- One-click switching between saved Steam accounts;
1–4for the first four. - Log in as Invisible / Offline and other persona states, copy SteamID formats and profile links.
- Per-account notes and custom images; desktop shortcuts for quick switching.
- Tray menu for switching without opening the window.
- Home / Shared roles with per-account kit indicators.
- Dota 2 module covering local settings and cloud settings (hero grids, builds).
- Journalled, hash-verified and crash-recoverable, with external-change detection.
- The machine-wide Dota
cfgfolder is never part of a kit.
- Copy between accounts — move
userdata/<id>/570settings from one account to another. Neither account has to be the one currently signed in. - Named config library — save a config as "my setup" or a friend's config, then apply it to any account later.
- Automatic revert points — every overwrite first snapshots the destination, so an Undo is always one click away.
- Local settings, cloud settings and the shared game
cfgfolder are selected independently, with warnings where Steam Cloud can undo a change.
- Advanced Cleaning for individual caches, logs, dumps and login files.
- Avatar refresh and VAC status check.
- Configurable account refresh: on launch, on a timer, and avatar cache expiry.
For anyone keeping more than a couple of accounts around. Everything here is sealed under your app-lock password — set one first, or the vault stays unavailable.
-
Stores what an account is: login name, password, authenticator seed and the email address bound to it. One encrypted blob, no plaintext metadata beside it.
-
Steam Guard codes from a stored authenticator seed, or read out of a bound inbox over IMAP — read-only, and never marking your mail as read.
-
Health checks for bans, profile visibility, account age and idle time. The everyday check never logs in; only an explicit "verify password" does.
-
Optional scheduled password checks, off by default and clearly labelled — this is the only setting that makes the app log in to a Steam account on its own. One account at a time, never at startup, and it stops for good if Steam ever rate-limits it.
-
Values are shown one at a time behind an explicit Reveal, and hide themselves again.
-
Handing an account to someone else as a passphrase-sealed file you move yourself — nothing is uploaded. Two kinds: sign-in access, or the account outright. Neither can be taken back afterwards, and the app says so rather than pretending otherwise.
It cannot sign in to Steam for you. See FEATURES.md for exactly which parts
are proven and which are not.
- System / Light / Dark, following the OS by default. One accent colour.
- The inherited theme packs are still there, collapsed under "Classic themes".
- Launch SteamSwitch. Accounts you've already logged into appear automatically.
- Right-click your main account → Set as Home.
- Right-click an account you share → Mark as shared account.
- Click a tile to switch.
To use the Dota kit, Dota 2 must be installed and both accounts must have played it at least once, so the config folders exist.
%AppData%\SteamSwitch\ Windows (or <exe folder>\SteamSwitch\ when portable)
~/Library/Application Support/SteamSwitch/ macOS
steamswitch.settings.json app settings
Settings/ per-platform settings
LoginCache/Steam/<account>/ saved login blocks
SessionKit/ transaction journals and config snapshots
Backups/Dota/ the config library and revert points
wwwroot/ your own images and themes
Uninstalling does not remove this folder. Delete it by hand if you want the saved account data gone; doing so does not sign you out of Steam.
SteamSwitch sends nothing anywhere. There is no telemetry, no crash reporting, no feedback channel and no update check. Statistics and crash dumps are written to your own data folder and never uploaded. The only outbound requests are to Valve, to fetch public profile data (avatars, VAC status, game names) — and those stop entirely if you turn on Offline mode in settings.
"Steam or a game is still running." Something is holding the config files. Close Steam and
Dota fully — check Task Manager for steam.exe, steamwebhelper.exe and dota2.exe.
"Files changed outside SteamSwitch." The live files no longer match what SteamSwitch wrote. Usually the other person played, or Steam Cloud pulled a different copy. Nothing has been overwritten; choose whether to keep what's there or restore the saved setup.
My hero grids came back wrong after a switch. Steam Cloud won. Re-apply with Steam closed, and consider disabling Steam Cloud for Dota on this PC.
"Last switch didn't finish." SteamSwitch was killed mid-write. Answer the recovery prompt; it knows which files were moved and where they went.
Switching does nothing, or asks for admin. Steam's registry values or userdata folder
aren't writable by your user. Try running SteamSwitch as administrator once.
Requires Go, Node.js with pnpm, and the Wails v3 CLI.
go install github.com/wailsapp/wails/v3/cmd/wails3@v3.0.0-alpha2.117
wails3 task common:generate:bindings # required before any frontend command
cd frontend && pnpm install && cd ..
wails3 task dev # run with live reload
wails3 task build # build into bin/
wails3 task package # Windows installer
wails3 task test # Go + frontend testsfrontend/bindings/ is generated and gitignored; frontend typechecking and tests cannot
resolve imports until it exists.
| Switching | Session Kit | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Windows | yes | yes | The original target. |
| macOS | yes | yes | Steam keeps the same file layout under ~/Library/Application Support/Steam, with registry.vdf standing in for the Windows registry. |
| Linux | no | no | Refused, not broken — see below. |
Everything OS-specific in the Steam engine lives behind one interface, osBackend
(internal/steam/os_backend.go), with one file per platform. On an OS with no backend the app
still runs — account lists, notes, images, settings — but every operation that would write to
a Steam install refuses with a clear error rather than proceeding.
That refusal is deliberate and is the reason Linux is not simply "enabled". The whole engine is only safe while Steam is closed, and "no Steam process found" is indistinguishable from "I cannot see processes at all". Flatpak and Snap installs put Steam in a sandbox where it is not reachable by process name from outside, so a Linux backend that only handled the native install would confidently report Steam as closed for a large share of users — and a cloud-synced Dota write made while Steam is up is reverted silently, with no error anywhere.
go test ./... reports 15 failures on macOS and Linux, inherited from upstream, that assume
Windows path and file-locking behaviour. See FORK.md for the exact list — that is the
expected baseline, not a regression.
FEATURES.md is the inventory of what is built and how confident each part is;
TESTING.md is the manual test plan it orders, for a real machine with Steam
installed.
SteamSwitch exists because of TcNo Account Switcher by TroubleChute (Wesley Pyburn) — it was both the inspiration and the codebase this fork began from. If you need to switch accounts on platforms other than Steam, go use the original: it supports two dozen of them and is actively maintained.
This fork narrows the scope to Steam, drops all outbound reporting, and adds Dota 2 config
management. FORK.md lists every divergence.
GPL-3.0. Original work © TroubleChute (Wesley Pyburn); fork modifications © 2026
Ivan Faeton Danishevskyi. See LICENSE and NOTICE.md.
Steam and Dota 2 are trademarks of Valve Corporation. This project is not affiliated with Valve. It only moves files that are already on your computer.