A whisper.cpp or llama.cpp server started for one dictation stayed loaded
until Dikte quit. On this machine that is 1.3 GB of VRAM for large-v3 plus
whatever the cleanup LLM takes, held all day between dictations that last
seconds.
Each Server now carries an idle window. A watcher thread per launch stops the
server once nothing has asked it anything for that long, and the next request
loads it again through serve(), which already starts what is not running.
Settings has one checkbox and one number for both servers, on by default at ten
minutes, and it only appears for a machine that runs a model here. The tray menu
says which models are loaded and offers to unload them now.
Two things the clock alone gets wrong, both held off by a count of requests in
flight:
* A file or a meeting is one address lookup and then minutes of work, which
to a clock started at the lookup looks exactly like a model nobody wants.
api.py and cleanup.py hold the count for the length of the request.
* The count must survive the start it triggered. cleanup._local takes the
hold and only then asks for the address, so a cold start happens inside it;
neither serve() nor _stop_now() resets the count any more.
Unloading by hand runs on the interface's thread, so it asks for the start lock
rather than waiting on it: a model still being read in is refused, the way one
in the middle of a request is, instead of freezing the window for as long as
the load takes.
The indicator asked QCursor.pos() which screen to appear on, and Wayland tells a client where the pointer is only while it is over one of that client's own windows. The indicator is never under the pointer, so the answer came back stale, or at the origin when the pointer had never been over a window of ours. Measured on Plasma 6: the origin under the Wayland platform, and a point frozen for the whole run through XWayland, which is the platform Dikte actually uses. Every indicator therefore landed in the corner of whichever screen holds 0,0, which on a two monitor desk is the wrong screen most of the time.
KWin knows, and answers for it over D-Bus with activeOutputName, naming outputs the way Qt names screens: by connector, natively and through XWayland alike. That answer now comes before the pointer, and the pointer still decides everywhere else, which is right on X11 and no worse than before on other Wayland desktops. It is the active output and not the pointer's, so on Plasma the two are the same screen only where the active screen is set to follow the mouse, and otherwise it is the focused window that decides, which is where the typing is going anyway. Nothing in the settings window promises the pointer any more.
Deciding the screen once, when the indicator appears, leaves it behind when the work moves to another monitor mid-recording, so overlay_follows_pointer keeps it up to date while it is up. Off by default: a ribbon that changes desks mid-sentence is one more thing moving while you are trying to talk. The compositor is asked four times a second rather than at the ribbon's 33 ms, because a hand moving a mouse across a desk is slower than that, and the call is given a 200 ms timeout so a wedged compositor cannot freeze the indicator with it.
One indicator stacking on another takes that one's screen and never asks for its own. Asked for itself it would answer where the session is now, which is not where the ribbon underneath was put a minute ago, and the pair would end up a monitor apart with the top one raised over nothing. That one is checked every tick, since its answer costs nothing.
The paste block was rewritten by both sides: master taught press() to
put the remembered application back in front (focus), this branch moved
the history write ahead of the paste and stopped restoring the old
clipboard over a transcript the key press refused. Kept this branch's
order and error handling, and handed press() the focus it now takes.
deleteLater destroyed a window whose model boxes a daemon thread was
still reporting into: a running download died with a RuntimeError, the
.part stayed on disk and the UI said nothing. Dropping the reference is
how the ordinary close path lets a window go, and the closures a thread
holds keep the object alive until it is done, so the rebuild now does
the same. While the transcriber or either model box is working the
rebuild is skipped altogether; _built_language keeps the old language,
so the next quiet save asks for it by itself.
The new window is also placed and turned to the old tab before it is
shown, so it no longer comes up at the default size and jumps. And
tests/test_ui.py now says that a save with a changed language emits
language_changed, and one without does not.
Pressing the shortcut while a transcript was being transcribed or cleaned up
did nothing, and the thought you had while waiting was lost. The microphone is
free the moment a recording stops, so the next dictation can now be spoken at
once; the pipeline queues it and each one is finished, pasted and reported in
the order it was spoken. The corner indicator stays with the recording under
way rather than being wiped by the previous run's progress, and a stop that
lands behind an unfinished run says it is waiting its turn.
The recorded WAV was deleted in a finally that did not care why the run
ended, so a whisper server being down destroyed the only copy of the
user's speech; a failed run now keeps its audio in the recordings
directory and names the path in the error. The history was written only
after the paste, and a failed key press restored the previous clipboard
over the fresh transcript: text not pasted, not on the clipboard, not in
the history, audio gone, all from one refused key. The history now comes
first, a failed press is a warning the row is amended to carry, and the
clipboard keeps the text the user has to paste by hand. Kept recordings
no longer overwrite each other inside one second, the keep_audio move
failing no longer falls through to the delete, and the history row
records whether cleanup actually ran rather than what the dictation gate
implies about an ask.
In the application: a recorder that failed to start emitted its error
synchronously and start() then wrote RECORDING over the handler's IDLE,
one more key press away from a BUSY nothing would ever end; start now
checks the recorder is running, like start_meeting always has. The new
died signal ends the run properly and transcribes what was captured. A
--paste override armed by a request that no-opped stopped haunting some
later unrelated run, and it dies with a cancelled or failed one. The
toggle, ask and pause debounce timers are per action, so a pause right
after a toggle is a pause and not a duplicate. Waiters outstanding at
quit or restart are settled instead of being read back as "the instance
is too old". The listing warm-up and the one-per-press backend lookup
move off the key press.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
listen() was the whole of the single-instance check and it cannot be one:
a Windows named pipe takes a second server on the same name rather than
refusing it, and everywhere else removeServer() first takes the live socket
away from the instance holding it. Starting Dikte over a running Dikte then
left two whole copies up, two tray icons and all, and the newer one's
sweep() killed the whisper the older one was answering dictations with. On
a machine that sleeps instead of logging out, that is one Start Menu click
away, and it cost a real dictation before it was understood.
A QLockFile in the data directory closes the race on all three systems,
taken before the QApplication is even built, and behind it the probe is the
side-effect-free status verb: the Settings window opens as the sign of life
only when a bare second start deliberately asks for it, not as a byproduct
of a probe racing a forwarded toggle. The two Windows relaunch dances
collapse into one ipc.respawn.
The checkout installer and the packaged setup each kept an autostart the
other could not see, so a machine that tried both started two copies at
every sign-in: each autostart now removes the other's entry, the silent
every-start repair backs off from a Run value whose target still exists,
and each uninstaller deletes the shared dikte.cmd only when the shim
names its own install.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
A check on the releases page once a day: at start, on a timer while Dikte
runs, from the General tab on demand, and from `dikte update` at a terminal.
What it finds goes in the tray menu and in one notification per version, and
opens the release page.
Nothing is downloaded and nothing is installed. The four downloads are
installed four different ways and three of those belong to the platform: a
Mac bundle cannot rewrite itself while it is running, the Windows setup has
an uninstall entry of its own, an AppImage is a file kept wherever its owner
keeps it, and a checkout is updated with git. Being wrong about any one of
them means an installation somebody has to repair by hand.
Versions are compared by their numbers alone. A build off master carries the
released number with its commit after it, and that build is ahead of the
release it names rather than behind it; read as a version suffix, every
nightly would be told to go back to a release it had already passed.
The clock lives in its own file rather than in the settings, since a check
runs while the settings window may be open and a background write into
config.json is what would overwrite whatever it holds.
Saving already switched the language everywhere strings are made at the
moment they are shown: the tray is rebuilt, the indicator and the message
box translate as they speak. The settings window is the one place written
once, at construction, so the window that took the new language was the
one place still showing the old one, and a tooltip asked for a restart.
Now the window remembers the language it was built in, and a save that
changed it has the app replace the window: a fresh one comes up where the
old one stood, on the same tab. The restart tooltip goes, having nothing
left to excuse.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Recording goes through ffmpeg's avfoundation input, and opening a capture
session there brings the process that did it to the front. ffmpeg is a
child of Dikte with no bundle of its own, so macOS credits the move to
Dikte: the window the user was dictating into goes inactive, its caret
stops, its title bar greys out, and the Cmd+V at the end of the run lands
somewhere other than the document it was meant for. Measured with a
TextEdit document in front:
press the shortcut front = TextEdit
recorder.start returns front = TextEdit
89 ms later front = Dikte
Nothing about the capture session can be asked not to do this. Starting
ffmpeg in its own session, and clearing __CFBundleIdentifier from its
environment, were both tried and both measured to make no difference, so
it is undone instead: the application in front is noted before the
indicator goes up, and a short watch puts it back the moment Dikte takes
the front. Measured at 99 ms from the moment it is taken, against the
title bar staying grey for the whole dictation before. All three ways in
do it, dictation, agent and meeting, since all three open the same
capture.
The indicator had a share of the same problem and needed AppKit for it
too, so mac_window.py carries both. An NSPanel is hidden by the system
the moment its application stops being the active one, which for a
dictation indicator is immediately, and ordering one to the front brings
its application with it unless it carries the nonactivating style bit.
Neither is reachable through Qt.
The runtime is loaded in _appkit() rather than at import, the way paste.py
loads its frameworks in _macos_api(), so the module imports on a machine
with no AppKit and the tests below run there as well: 52 new tests, none
of them skipped anywhere.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
Three files disagreed. The test workflow gained a job on either side, so
both stay: the Mac now parses the release and packaging scripts as well,
and Windows keeps its own job below.
`restart` and `launch_gui` both start Dikte again, and master moved that
argv into `ipc.launcher()` because a packaged build has no `__main__.py`
to name. Windows still cannot use execv there, so the detached start it
needs now takes what the launcher hands it rather than spelling the
interpreter and the script itself.
The test counts in CONTRIBUTING are the suite as it stands after the
merge: 1104 of 1147 run anywhere, and the 43 left are the Linux ones.
Installing meant cloning the repository and running a shell script, which
is a fair ask of somebody who already has a terminal open and no ask at
all of anybody else. The releases page now carries an AppImage and a disk
image per Mac architecture: a push to master rebuilds a rolling "latest",
a v* tag publishes a version and leaves it there, and the Run button in
the Actions tab raises the number by running scripts/release.sh, which is
the same script and not a second copy of what it does.
Two things in the application had to give for that. A build has no
__main__.py on disk, and an AppImage is mounted somewhere new every run,
so the command a shortcut is registered with cannot go on being this
interpreter and this file; ipc.launcher() answers with the AppImage or
the bundle instead. And a build carries its own libstdc++, which every
process it starts inherits through LD_LIBRARY_PATH and none of them can
live with: ffmpeg, ydotool and wl-copy are the distribution's binaries
built against the distribution's libraries, and AppImageLauncher, which
is what starting the AppImage again goes through, refuses outright.
integrate.py puts that variable back before anything else runs.
Nothing installs itself over an installation that is already there.
install.sh's menu entry, install-mac.sh's login item and the desktop file
AppImageLauncher writes are each recognised and left alone, so trying a
download once does not quietly move the machine onto it. `dikte
integrate` is how you ask for it outright, and --remove takes it back.
The disk image carries an ffmpeg, pinned and checksummed, because macOS
records through one and ships nothing like it. It is signed ad-hoc and
not with an Apple certificate, so a first launch is refused until Open
Anyway and the permissions are asked for again after each update; both
READMEs and the release notes say so.
Every file this branch touches moved into dikte/, so the merge is mostly the
rename following the edits. What needed a hand:
hotkey.py: master replaced the _macos()/_gnome() pair with one backend()
chooser, and this branch had added _windows() to the pair. Windows is a fifth
value of the chooser now, and everything that used to ask "macOS or Windows?"
asks backend() instead. The key is held by the running process there, so
installs_shortcuts() and shortcut_needs_restart() are both false for it, and
desktop_name() says Windows.
install.ps1 and the Windows README name dikte/__main__.py, the entry point the
Linux and macOS installers were pointed at in the same commit. The Start Menu
entry, the autostart entry and the dikte.cmd shim all come off one $entry
variable.
settings_ui.py: the shortcut tab now has a Windows sentence of its own, with
the Turkish for it. Falling through to the branch master wrote for a desktop
with no registry would have told a Windows user to check /dev/input. Nothing
covers that branch: there is no Windows Settings test class, the way there is
one for macOS.
CONTRIBUTING: the chooser it names is backend() now, and the test count is the
merged one, 1067 of 1110 running anywhere.
Twenty-two files at the top of the tree was the first thing anybody saw of
this repository. They are one package now, imported relatively, and the three
scripts that are not the front door moved under scripts/. install.sh stays
where the README has always said it is.
What starts the application is dikte/__main__.py: python3 -m dikte runs it,
and so does naming the file, which is what the launcher symlink, both .desktop
files, the macOS bundle and every registered shortcut do. Run by path there is
no package around it, so it puts the checkout on sys.path itself.
The installers now keep the keys you chose when they are given none, which is
what an update is: update.sh no longer has to read them out and pass them back.
An updater from before this commit cannot read them at all, so the one thing it
can say, the default key with an empty discard key, is read as "nothing was
asked for" rather than obeyed. That guard can go once nobody is updating across
this commit.
yusufipek
Yusuf İpek