Checked against the release listings rather than guessed: whisper.cpp publishes
Win32 and x64 for Windows and nothing else, while llama.cpp does publish
bin-win-cpu-arm64.zip. So a Snapdragon machine gets a native cleanup model and
an emulated transcriber, which is slow enough that the cloud is the better
answer there, and neither the code nor the README said so.
The test pins it, so that a whisper.cpp release which does start publishing an
arm64 build turns the choice red rather than being quietly ignored.
Three of the four collisions were the same one: master moved the directory
rule into paths.py while this branch was adding a Windows case to the copy in
config.py and the second copy in ggml.py. The case moves to paths.py with the
rest of it, and the directories test moves to tests/test_paths.py where master
put its neighbours.
The fourth is MeetingRecorder, which now starts a process per capture device.
Windows keeps its two lines there: no console window for either process, and
a stop that terminates rather than sending a signal the platform does not have.
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.
Windows joins the three systems as its own entry in each table: DirectShow
through ffmpeg for capture, the Win32 clipboard and SendInput for the paste,
RegisterHotKey for the global shortcut, and the whisper.cpp and llama.cpp
Windows zips (the OpenBLAS whisper build, which transcribes about twice as
fast on a plain CPU). Settings go to APPDATA, data to LOCALAPPDATA, and
install.ps1 adds the Start Menu entry, the dikte command and an optional
autostart. Meetings are not supported yet: Windows offers nothing to record
the far side from.
Porting surfaced three fixes that were not Windows specific:
- A stopped or overlong download tried to delete its .part file while still
holding it open, which Windows refuses. The unlinks now wait for the handle.
- The CLI transcribed files without handing the local servers their settings
first, so a local provider failed with "no model downloaded" wherever the
GUI had not run in the same process.
- The audio content types are pinned instead of asked of the registry, which
answers differently machine to machine.
One fix is Windows specific but sits in shared code: shutdown() does not end
a blocked recv there, so stopping a request also closes the socket handle.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
The hash was checked when there was one and skipped when there was not,
which is the wrong way round: everything fetched here is either run or
parsed by something written in C++, and the case with no hash is the one
where that matters most and says least.
Not hypothetical. GitHub publishes a digest for whisper.cpp v1.9.1 and for
llama.cpp today, and publishes none for whisper.cpp v1.8.0 and older, so
anything reaching for an older tag would have installed an executable
nobody checked.
_wait_ready can raise rather than return, and the process it was waiting on
is ours with nothing else holding a reference to it. Leaving it running
leaks a loaded model with nobody left to ask it anything, which is the
whole failure this class is careful about everywhere else. Found by two
stand-in servers still running after a test run.
Two programs, one treatment: ask GitHub what was released, take the build
this machine can run, check it against the sha256 the index published, then
fetch a model from Hugging Face the same way and keep one server up on a
port of its own.
Neither list is written into the source. A model catalogue in here means a
release of Dikte for every model somebody else publishes, and a pinned
version means one for every whisper.cpp release; both are somebody else's
news. The lists are read at the moment the settings window is opened and
cached for a few hours, and a cache that has gone stale still answers when
the network does not.
Nothing that lands on disk is trusted for having arrived, which matters
more here than usual because half of what is fetched is a program Dikte
then runs.
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