Only GNOME was recognised, and everything else was handed to KWin. On i3,
XFCE, Cinnamon, MATE, sway and the rest, Dikte wrote an entry into
kglobalshortcutsrc that nothing reads, called the session KDE, and
promised that the keys would work after the next login. They never did.
There is no backend to write for any of them. The /dev/input listener is
already desktop-agnostic, so those sessions are the case macOS has always
been: no registry, nothing to install, nothing to remove, and the
combination held by the running process. One backend() function decides
which of the four this session has, and the name shown, the status read
back, what Install writes, what Settings explains and what the installer
promises are all taken from it, so they cannot disagree.
A desktop now only counts when the program that writes its registry is
there too. A GNOME session without gsettings and a Plasma one without
kwriteconfig6 fall to the listener rather than to a file, which is also
how Plasma 5 stops erroring on a kwriteconfig6 it never had.
What Settings shows on those desktops is the truth: no Install button, no
KWin, no listener checkbox (it is the mechanism, not a choice), what
reading /dev/input costs, that the focused application sees the keys too,
and the command to bind if you would rather your desktop owned them. The
evdev listener records what it is listening for the way the Carbon one
does, so the status line has something to say there at all.
Closes#28
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.
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.
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.
Dictation ends the same way every time: the words you said land in the window
you were in. But half of what you say to a machine is not text to place, it is
something to do, and the answer to "what is on my calendar today" is not that
sentence written out.
`claude -p` is that session run without a window: the same skills, the same
connected services, the same account. So a second shortcut records exactly as
the first one does and sends the transcript there instead, and what comes back
is pasted where the transcript would have been. Which is what puts "save that
to my calendar on Thursday at three" inside a text field that has nothing to do
with Claude.
Permissions are the part worth being deliberate about, because nothing here can
answer a prompt: a mode that would have asked denies instead. It runs in `auto`,
which decides for itself with the prompt-injection checks left on, and the other
two modes are one setting away. What Claude was not allowed to touch is reported
rather than swallowed, since a reply that reads perfectly normal is otherwise
the only sign that the job did not happen.
Commands close together stay in one conversation, so "and move that to Thursday"
knows what "that" is; half an hour of silence ends it, as does the tray. The
answer is written to be read where it lands: no headings, no lists, and a
sentence naming what was done when something was done.
Its output is read as it streams rather than waited out, so the corner names the
tool it is on. A calendar lookup took 29 s in testing, which a still indicator
would have made indistinguishable from a hang. The clock and the stop button are
watched from a thread of their own, because the stream blocks between lines and
a model that thinks for a minute sends none: they end the run by killing the
process, which closes the stream and unwinds everything else on its own.
Transcript cleanup is off on this path. Claude reads through "erm" and "hani"
without help, and skipping it saves an API call and a second or two in front of
a screen you are standing at.
Who said what is the hard part of a meeting transcript, and the usual answer
is to hand one mixed recording to a model and ask it to tell the voices apart.
That guess is wrong often enough to be worse than useless in minutes, where a
decision attributed to the wrong person is a decision nobody made.
So the question never reaches a model. ffmpeg records the microphone and the
default sink's monitor as one stereo stream, you on the left and everyone else
on the right, and one process reading both is what keeps them aligned over an
hour. Each channel is transcribed on its own and the two are interleaved on a
single timeline, so attribution is settled by the wire a voice arrived on.
What a microphone picks up from the speakers lands on both channels; our copy
is dropped when it overlaps theirs in time and says nearly the same thing.
The stream is written to disk as it arrives rather than held in memory, so
length costs nothing and a crash costs the tail instead of the whole meeting.
Every stage the run reaches is recorded in meetings.jsonl, so a failure while
summarising does not throw away the transcription of an hour of audio: the
retry reads the transcript back out of the document and picks up from there.
A run that dies keeps its recording whether or not audio is being kept.
The minutes model is configured on its own, under Settings, with its own
prompt, and it is told who was expected in the room so the names come out
spelled right. It is told outright that the transcript is a record of other
people talking, not instructions addressed to it.
The built-in listener now holds several bindings rather than one, and the KDE
side is parameterised by desktop id, so the meeting toggle gets a shortcut of
its own on the same footing as the dictation one.
The listener reads /dev/input and reacts the instant a key goes down. The
KDE shortcut answers the same press by launching a whole Python process,
which then talks over IPC, so its toggle lands a few hundred milliseconds
later. The 400 ms guard caught that echo only when the machine happened to
be quick, and otherwise the recording was started and stopped by one press:
"No speech detected".
Route the two apart. A toggle arriving from outside the process right
behind a listener trigger is that echo, and its lateness also proves the
KDE shortcut is live, which leaves the listener with nothing to do but
double every press. So retire it, remember that in the config, and say so
in the tray rather than changing behaviour silently.
The screenshots were downscaled to 430 px wide, which made the UI text
blurry. Restore them at native 1292 px as lossless WebP, which is also
half the size of the original PNGs (72 KB against 155 KB for the largest).
Rewrite every em dash in prose, comments, docstrings and interface strings
as ordinary punctuation.
Ctrl+Space starts and stops a recording. The audio goes to OpenAI for
transcription, a model on OpenRouter strips the fillers and restores
punctuation, and the result is copied and pasted into the focused window.
Only the Python standard library and PyQt6 — HTTP, multipart uploads and
WAV writing are all hand-rolled.
- pw-record captures raw 16 kHz mono PCM with a live level meter
- the corner indicator is drawn through XWayland, since a Wayland client
cannot position its own window
- silence is caught before it costs an API call, relative to each
recording's own noise floor, plus a filter for the stock phrases models
invent when handed silence
- audio and video files can be transcribed too, optionally with [mm:ss]
timestamps, chunked through ffmpeg for long inputs
- global shortcut installs as a KDE custom shortcut, with an evdev
listener as a fallback until the session is restarted
- Turkish and English interface, following the system locale by default
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