A phone call in the middle of a dictation left two choices: send what
was said so far off to be transcribed, or throw it away. Both end the
sentence you were in the middle of. Now the recording can be held: the
microphone stays ours, what was said before the pause stays in the
buffer, and what is said during it is dropped.
The capture program keeps running and keeps handing blocks over, which
are read and thrown away rather than left in the pipe. Stopping it
instead would mean asking the sound server for the device again on the
way back, and that is the one moment another application can take it: a
recording would be lost to the phone call it was paused for.
The clock stops with it. Paused time is time the recording does not
have, so the indicator and the length limit both go by what was
actually captured, and a five minute limit is not spent waiting.
The indicator says so as well, since a pulsing dot, moving bars and a
counting clock otherwise all say the words are still going in: the
ribbon freezes where the pause found it and turns amber behind two
bars. The tray menu holds and resumes it, `dikte pause` does, and so
does a global shortcut, which starts empty because holding a recording
is not something a keyboard has a habit for.
Dictation and a command to the agent both, whichever is recording. A
meeting is left out: it writes to a file as it goes and keeps two
streams aligned itself, and neither of those wants a hole in it.
The macOS backends were already here: CoreAudio capture through ffmpeg,
pbcopy and CoreGraphics, Carbon hotkeys, the paths under ~/Library. What
was missing was everything that installs them, so install.sh hands over to
install-mac.sh on Darwin rather than growing a branch per line: the XDG
directories, the .desktop files and the shortcut registry mean nothing
there, and an application is a bundle rather than a path. The bundle
carries a copy of the interpreter, because macOS files the microphone and
Accessibility permissions against the process that asks, and a launcher
running Homebrew's python3 would have asked as python3 and shared the
grant with everything else on that interpreter. It is signed ad-hoc so a
reinstall is the same application rather than two more dialogs, and it
says so plainly when a brew upgrade has moved the tree it needs.
uninstall.sh and update.sh follow it.
The tray icon was invisible: QIcon.fromTheme wants a freedesktop icon
theme and hands back a null icon without one, which in a menu bar is the
whole interface gone. trayicon.py draws the three shapes as template
images, so they follow the menu bar into dark mode, and the bundle's icon
comes off the same glyph rather than a binary in the repository. Linux
keeps its own icons; these are used only where the theme has nothing.
paths.py is the fix that was never about a Mac. config.py imports ggml.py,
so ggml.py could not ask it where the data goes; each worked it out for
itself and only one of them knew about macOS. Settings went to ~/Library
while several gigabytes of models went to ~/.local/share, which is not a
place a Mac user looks and not a place uninstall.sh --purge would have
deleted from.
Ctrl+Space is the input-source switch there and Cmd+Space is Spotlight, so
the default is Ctrl+Option+Space, and hotkey.default_combo is the one
place that difference lives. The first paste asks for Accessibility with
kAXTrustedCheckOptionPrompt, which is what creates the row to switch on;
asking the other way opens a pane Dikte is not listed in. `dikte shortcut
status` asks the running instance, since the combination is held by that
process and by nothing else.
Local speech to text is the one piece a Mac builds by hand. whisper.cpp
publishes no macOS binary and Homebrew's is configured with
WHISPER_BUILD_SERVER=OFF, so it installs whisper-cli and not the server
Dikte talks to; program_path already takes a whisper-server off the PATH
or out of Settings, so the answer is the one a Linux distribution gets,
and the README carries the cmake line. CI grows a macOS job on 3.11 and
3.13, the only place the Carbon and CoreGraphics libraries have to be
there to be opened.
Written and tested on macOS 27.0 arm64. Two things are still unverified on
a Mac: the paste end to end, which waits on the Accessibility toggle, and
a meeting recording, which needs a loopback driver.
Four files disagreed, and all four the same way: master had turned things the
Mac branch wrote out by hand into one list to read from.
Shortcuts are the whole of it. master gave every binding a row in
hotkey.SHORTCUTS, so the Mac's DESKTOP_IDS is gone and CarbonHotkey reads the
desktop id off that row, which also gives the new cancel key a status line on a
Mac. Settings builds its four rows through master's _shortcut_row, and that one
now asks _install_buttons for Install and Remove, so macOS gets a combination
box and nothing to press, and everywhere else the button says the desktop's own
name. dikte.py starts the listener from the same table, on macOS whatever the
setting says: there is nothing installed for it to be a fallback to.
The rest is two imports and a paste list that lives in paste.Desktop now.
Cleanup was the one step with only one place to run. Speech to text has three
providers behind a setting and the agent has three behind another, but the
model that drops the "eee"s out of a sentence was always a request to
OpenRouter, which meant a second key on a machine that already pays for a model
and already hands whole dictations to it as commands. Claude Code and Codex can
rewrite a sentence as easily as they can put something in your calendar, and
now they may.
cleanup.py is where that choice lives, so worker, the file transcriber and the
meeting all ask the same question rather than each building the same OpenRouter
request. What comes out of a CLI that failed is a CleanupError, which is an
ApiError, because to the chain a cleanup that failed is a cleanup that failed
however it was run: the raw transcript is still pasted and the reason still
shows in the corner, unchanged.
Neither CLI is given anything it does not need for the job. No tools, no MCP
servers, no session to resume, and the home directory rather than wherever the
agent is pointed, since a project's instructions have opinions about how text
should be written and none of them are about this transcript. The transcript
goes in fenced the same way the OpenRouter call fences it, because it is
material rather than an instruction however much of it reads like one. Claude
takes the cleanup rules as its whole system prompt; Codex has no system prompt
of its own, so they ride in front of the text, and its answer is read from the
file it writes on the way out rather than from a stdout that also carries a
header, its thinking and a token count.
The cost is seconds. OpenRouter answers in about one, a CLI in six or seven,
because each one opens a whole session to do it. That is the trade the box
says out loud, and the default has not moved: OpenRouter cleans up until you
say otherwise.
Codex's two lowest thinking levels now ask for "low". "minimal" was its bottom
rung until the newer models replaced it with "none", and each of them answers
the other's word with a 400, which the agent has been quietly hitting too.
In the settings window the model box belongs to whoever is chosen rather than
meaning three different things in turn, since an OpenRouter id and a Claude
alias do not belong in the same field, and under it is the same "found it or
not" line the agent tab has. dikte doctor asks about the program instead of the
key when a CLI does the cleaning, and the history records which model actually
did it.
Stopping a recording is the step there is no taking back. It is what sends the
audio off, and a moment later the sentence you did not mean to dictate is in
the clipboard and pasted into whatever window you were typing in. The tray menu
was the only way out, and by the time it is open the recording has already
gone. Discarding needed to be as quick as starting, which means a key.
Ctrl+Alt+Space rather than Escape: the combination the recording started with,
one modifier along, so the two are one gesture with a modifier between them.
Escape is the obvious choice and the wrong one, because it belongs to whichever
window has focus, and while you are talking something else usually has it. It
works on a dictation and on a command for the agent alike, since the one you
want to take back is the one that is running.
That made four global shortcuts, and four is the number at which three copies
of the same forty lines stop being a coincidence. The command line already had
a table of them; hotkey.py now holds it, and the settings window reads it too,
so a shortcut is a row rather than a combination box, two buttons, a status
label and three methods written out again. The window no longer takes the
commands to run as arguments either, because ipc.command_for already knows them
from the verb. Adding the fourth key is what this buys: one line in the table
and one call per row.
Both places a key can live are told about it. The listener catching the press
and the KDE shortcut arriving behind it go through the same echo guard the
toggle already had, so the two are one discard rather than two, and the tray
calls the inner method as it already did for the toggle. Ctrl+Space and
Ctrl+Alt+Space land on the same evdev key code, so there is a test for the
modifier matching that keeps them apart.
install.sh takes the second key as a second argument and refuses to register
two of the same. It hands both to `dikte shortcut install` rather than writing
kglobalshortcutsrc itself, which is what makes it work on GNOME, and what
finally puts the chosen key in the settings as well: the built-in listener
reads it from there, so a key written to only one of the two places was a key
that half worked.
Left empty in the settings window the discard key stays empty, unlike the
dictation shortcut which falls back to Ctrl+Space: a recording can always be
thrown away from the tray menu, so there is nothing to guarantee here.
Reworked on top of master. The Groq request itself needed nothing beyond a key,
a base URL and a model id, but two providers fit in an if and an else where
three do not, and each one was written out four times: in transcribe_target(),
in the key rows of the settings window, in save and in load.
config.TRANSCRIBERS holds them now, one row each: the name the user sees and
the three settings that keep its key, its endpoint and its model. The variable
an empty key falls back to is the name of its setting, shouted. The provider
box, save, load, `dikte models --provider` and `dikte test-key` all read that
table, so a fourth provider is a row and a default rather than a branch in five
files. The key field, its Test button and its answer line are built once and
the three signals became one that carries which key was asked about.
The tests moved into the files of the modules they cover and check what a
provider actually changes: that the request goes to api.groq.com with the right
model and fields, that the glossary now reaches everything except OpenRouter,
that a Groq error says Groq, and that the settings window carries the key and
the model there and back. GROQ_API_KEY is cleared for the test run like the
other two, so a developer who has one does not send a test to the network.
Co-authored-by: Muzaffer Emre <[email protected]>
Dikte already chose its clipboard programs once instead of in every
function; macOS joins that table rather than adding a branch to each one.
A Mac copies through pbcopy and presses Cmd+V straight into CoreGraphics,
records through AVFoundation, and asks Carbon for its global shortcuts.
The three tables are paste.Desktop, audio.Sound, and the pair of
predicates in hotkey.py. Each reads sys.platform inside the chooser, so a
test can stand somewhere else: 697 of the 737 tests now run on any
machine, the Wayland and X11 halves included, and the suite passes whole
whichever system it is run on.
Two things a Mac does not have needed saying rather than pretending:
there is no shortcut registry to install into, so Settings offers no
Install button and the listener is the mechanism instead of a fallback;
and nothing is offered as the sound the speakers are playing, so a
meeting needs BlackHole or Loopback and says so. The KDE-only labels
around them were already wrong on GNOME, and now name whichever desktop
is there.
Co-authored-by: firat <[email protected]>
install_shortcut(), remove_shortcut(), shortcut_status() and desktop_name()
were added and nothing called them: the settings window and the command line
both still went straight to the KDE ones. On GNOME, pressing Install ran
kwriteconfig6, which is not there, and the three interface strings written for
this never appeared. README said the settings window installs a GNOME or KDE
shortcut, and it installed neither.
Both callers go through the chooser now, and the status line names whichever
desktop answered.
A stem is all digits too, so "dikte meetings show 20260801" was read as a
position and found nothing: there is no twenty-millionth meeting. A number
counts back only while there are that many meetings to count back through,
and anything larger is a date somebody typed.
The socket carried a bare word and said nothing back, so a script could press
the buttons but never learn what was said. A request is JSON now, it can ask to
be answered when the run ends rather than when it starts, and the reply carries
the transcript, the agent's answer, or why nothing happened. The verbs that do
not need the microphone run in the caller's own process, which is what makes
transcribing a file or reading a setting work over ssh.
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