Reject failed Whisper GPU attempts, identify Llama devices from model buffers, and keep historical diagnostics independent of current settings. Report loaded backends without inferring build support, with regression coverage for each case.
program_path takes the custom path as its second argument, and config.py
passes it, but the settings window never did. Happened on this machine:
Compiled my own whisper.cpp and llama.cpp with CUDA and pointed the
settings at them. The box with no downloaded copy said "Not installed."
The box with one said "Downloaded, version b4938." naming a processor
build while the CUDA one did the transcribing.
LocalModelBox is now handed a callable, so the setting is read when
the label is drawn rather than frozen when the window is built.
The label reflects that too. A path set by hand now says so, instead of
claiming Dikte downloaded something it didn't.
Two conflicts, both where the local cleanup grew a second thing at once.
cleanup._local now passes the server's context alongside the timeout, and this
branch wrapped that same call in the busy() hold; the call takes both.
FakeServer gained a `context` attribute on master and a `held` counter here.
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 publisher note is written while the settings window is still being
built, when its label is eight pixels wide. Wrapped against that width the
sentence came out a hundred and twenty lines tall, and the minimum taken
from it did not stay a minimum: QLabel folds the widget's minimum size into
its own cached size hints and clears that cache only when the text changes.
So the row stood two thousand pixels tall, carrying the model box, the
status line and the options under it off the bottom of the window, and
picking another publisher was what brought them back.
Nothing to measure against yet means nothing to claim yet. The show and the
resize come back for it once there is a real width.
Opening the connection takes ten or twenty seconds, and the byte counts
under the model box only start after it. Until then the line read "X has
not been downloaded yet" beside a button that had just turned into Stop,
so a download that was running looked like a click that had not landed.
The stop had the same gap the other way round: should_stop is read
between blocks, and the wait for the server to answer is not between
blocks, so pressing Stop during it changed nothing on screen either.
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 two local model boxes handed over a flat list sorted by size and left
every choice in it to the reader. For whisper that interleaved the models:
large-v3-turbo-q5_0 landed between the two medium quantisations, half a
screen from the turbo model it is a copy of. For cleanup it was forty
repository ids, half of which answer with nothing at all because what they
publish is split across files or larger than the cap, and an empty box read
as though the click had not registered.
Now each box says what the machine is, groups the list by model, and marks
the row to take:
- whisper rows are grouped by model, with the quantisations and the
English-only files under the model they are a copy of, and every row says
its bit depth rather than leaving q5_1 and Q4_K_M and BF16 to be decoded.
- the recommendation follows the machine. Under 4 GB it is small-q5_1;
with a graphics interface and 15 GB it is large-v3-q5_0, which is worth
about two and a half points of word error in the languages that are not
English; in between it is turbo, and a processor build where the Vulkan
one belongs is not counted as a card.
- a row larger than half the memory less a gigabyte says it is too big.
- the publisher box holds the five suggestions until the switch beside it
is turned on, and a line under it says in words what the chosen one is.
- a publisher that answers with nothing says why instead of going blank.
- the draft heads (dflash, dspark, eagle3) are no longer offered as models,
and neither are the base models that sit beside their tuned twin.
master grew _pick_asset() while this branch grew a second answer to the
same question inside install_program(). Two functions deciding which
archive this machine wants is one too many, so the managed build is
asked for at the top of the picker: Dikte's own Vulkan whisper-server
first where the machine is one it is built for, then upstream's newest,
then the nightly pointer, then the newest release that carries a build.
install_program() is back to master's three lines and reads which of the
two landed off the asset name.
Changing the publisher left the model box untouched: the old selection was carried over, added back as "not downloaded" and selected again, so a model the new repository does not publish could be saved against it. The selection is now only carried within the publisher it was made in, every keystroke in the publisher box no longer starts its own request, and a list that comes back for a publisher that is no longer chosen is dropped rather than answering the wrong one.
The status line grew two things it could not say before. A row rebuilt from a name alone carries no file to fetch, and the Download button stayed lit over it doing nothing; those rows now say the publisher does not offer the model, and the button is out. A model that is here while the program above it is not no longer reads "Ready", which is what had people asking why nothing transcribed.
The button disappeared the moment anything landed, and nothing else on
the window asks for that download. So a machine that got the processor
build before its graphics driver was installed can never be given the
Vulkan one, and nobody can pick up a newer whisper.cpp either: both of
those are the same missing control.
It reads "Download again" once a copy is here, and stays hidden while a
system one is on the PATH, because that is the copy that would run.
The install falls back to upstream's CPU archive whenever Dikte's own
release, the file in it, or its reviewed digest is not there, and until
the package is published by hand that is every download. It happened
without a word: the window said "Downloaded, version v1.9.3." either
way, and a graphics card sitting idle looks exactly like one being used.
The install record now carries which of the two builds landed, written
only where both were on offer, and the settings window says so on the
line that already reports the version.
A timestamped run on OpenRouter always asked openai/whisper-1 for the
segments, whatever model was picked for plain transcription. Not every
model there returns segment times, so the one to use is now its own
setting, openrouter_subtitle_model, shown in the speech-to-text box only
when OpenRouter is the provider. Empty keeps the old whisper-1 fallback.
Target carries the choice as subtitle_model and timestamp_model() reads
it; the other providers are unchanged.
Two things the first pass got wrong.
The card was named out of whichever listing came first, so a machine
with both a CUDA build and a Vulkan loader could have its card named
from the wrong one. Worse, whisper numbers every device it can see in
one sequence while the handle carries the backend's own index: a
processor-only build lent a Vulkan backend through GGML_BACKEND_PATH
reports "device 1: Vulkan0", and reading that listing by the handle's
digit names whatever sat in slot zero. The backend's own enumeration is
asked first now, because it is the only one indexed the way the handle
is, and whisper's listing is a fallback taken only when it names
exactly one card.
And "this build carries no graphics backend" left the reader with
nowhere to go. It is the one case with a fix worth naming: whisper.cpp
publishes no build that reaches a card on Linux, and program_path runs
a copy from the system ahead of the downloaded one, so installing one
is the whole remedy. Server.state() now says which copy is running,
and the line says so only when it is Dikte's own download; a system
build that cannot reach the card gets the shorter sentence, since
installing it again would change nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019zqCqhmeaNT6m1GPp8ZWPp
"Use the graphics card" was a flag and nothing else: whisper got -ng
when it was off, llama got -ngl 99 or 0, and nobody looked at what
happened next. A build without a GPU backend runs on the processor
while the box stays ticked, which is what the release archives for
Linux do, every time. Nothing anywhere reported whether the local
server was even up.
Both servers already say where the model went, in the log Dikte
captures. It is read back once the server reports ready and turned
into a backend, a card and, for llama, the layers it offloaded. The
verdict comes from what whisper committed to -- "using X backend" and
the model buffer -- rather than from the devices it merely listed: a
card that is found and then fails to initialise sends it back to the
processor, and the listing alone would have called that a graphics
card. A log that says nothing stays "could not tell" instead of being
guessed at; a hand-built macOS whisper has Metal compiled in and
prints no backend line at all.
The state is then somewhere to be seen. Server.state() is a snapshot
of the process and what it settled on, and it reaches `dikte status`,
`dikte doctor` and a line under each local model box in the settings
window. doctor reads the log from disk when no instance is running, so
it still answers on a machine where Dikte is closed, and it says which
of the three it is: what the last run used, that the last run said
nothing, or that none ever ran here. Where the card was asked for and
not obtained, the line says which of the two it is -- none was found,
or this build carries none -- because only the second is worth
replacing a download over.
The tests grew a second isolation. They read ggml's own data
directory, which is the real one on the machine running them, and
program_path prefers a whisper-server on the PATH, so the suite
answered from whatever the developer happened to have installed. Both
are now the test's own.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019zqCqhmeaNT6m1GPp8ZWPp
The agent and meeting tabs opened with an intro paragraph, and the
cleanup provider box showed a long tooltip comparing the providers.
None of them earned the space: the intro texts were unclear and the
tooltip restated what picking a provider already shows. The orphaned
Turkish translations go with them.
Master grew Google AI Studio and Antigravity as providers, a doctor that
names each provider's own key, and settings that fetch every hosted
model list as the window opens. OpenCode Go is folded into each: its
name joins SERVICES and the doctor's key table, its key row sits beside
Google's, its Fetch button follows the per-provider pattern Google's
uses, and _load_hosted_models fetches its catalog at open when a key is
on file, filling the cleanup and agent boxes alike.
Codex's list already arrived on its own, because reading a cache on disk
costs nothing. The other three lists were behind a Fetch button, which
meant the built-in ones aged in front of anyone who never pressed it. Now
OpenRouter's and Google's lists are fetched when the settings window
opens, and Antigravity's comes off `agy models`, which prints one
id-tab-name line per model and answers over the network in a couple of
seconds; all three run off the interface thread.
Nobody asked, so nothing is reported: a failure changes nothing on
screen, the built-in lists stay, and the Fetch buttons remain both the
retry and the place an error is worth explaining. A provider whose key
has not been given is not called at all, so opening Settings is not by
itself a request to two vendors.
Also drops an import the merge had left in twice.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <[email protected]>
Codex already refreshes its boxes from the source at open, so the
built-in list is never the whole truth for longer than a window takes to
build. OpenCode Go now gets the same courtesy: one request to /models on
a background thread, both of its boxes refilled with the picked model
kept, skipped entirely when there is no key to send.
Nothing was measured that put OpenCode Go beside it, so the tooltip
claims only what is known: OpenRouter is the quickest, and OpenCode Go
merely needs nothing installed either. The translation follows word for
word.
ox-alpha-free is not in the /models answer, and the comment claimed the
chat endpoint hides Grok, Luna, MiniMax and Qwen when its own catalog
lists them. The built-in list is a starting set; the Fetch button asks
the endpoint for the full catalog of the day.
The one button lived in the OpenRouter model row, which leaves the
screen whenever another provider is chosen, so the OpenCode fetch path
could never be clicked. The OpenCode row now carries its own button into
the same handler, the row as a whole is what hides, and the fetched list
lands in the box it belongs to without touching the meeting box.
The settings-storage paragraph goes back to the one sentence it was. The screen list now shows native resolutions rather than the scaled ones, the Turkish tab is named Ekran, and the repositioning comment says what a named screen changes.
Codex now asks itself for its model list, doctor grew ready flags and a
per-provider line, and the Groq key joined the masked ones; the OpenCode
additions are folded into each. The no-CLI cleanup test follows the
fake_run to fake_cli rename.
Both sides rewrote the doctor: master rebuilt it around ready flags so a
fully local setup stops reading as broken, while this branch taught it
that Google has a key of its own and that the local model has neither a
key nor a program. Kept master's structure and folded the branch in: the
two hosted providers answer for their keys, a CLI for its program, and
the JSON keeps both the provider-aware "key" and master's "ready".
SECRET_KEYS gained groq on master and gemini here; the resolution keeps
all four. _conclude was also changed by both: master stopped matching
stderr wording and asks _API_TROUBLE instead, this branch renamed its
last parameter to the provider's short name so a session is stored under
the name it is read back by; the rename now rides on master's body.
codex_models() and the settings loaders landed beside the new Gemini
ones, so both stay. The new cleanup tests called the CLI fake by its old
name, fake_run, which master had renamed to fake_cli.
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.
OpenRouter's free tier rate-limits and carries no free Gemini model, and
cleaning up through Claude Code costs a fixed few seconds because it opens
a whole CLI session to drop three "uh"s. Google's own free tier suits a
short, frequent request, and its OpenAI-compatible endpoint answers
/chat/completions, so cleanup there is one request and the same code path
OpenRouter already takes.
The one thing that is not shared is the thinking level. Google reads
OpenAI's flat reasoning_effort rather than OpenRouter's object, and "none"
is how thinking is turned off, so it is sent rather than skipped: a Flash
model left to think spends exactly the second this provider was chosen to
save. Its top two rungs land on "high", which is as far as Google goes.
Speech to text stays where it was. That endpoint has no
/audio/transcriptions behind it, audio only goes in as base64 inside a
chat message, and what comes back has none of the segment times a subtitle
file or a meeting transcript is built out of.
Antigravity joins as well, on cleanup and as an agent. It is a CLI like the
other two and costs the same session, so it is here for people who already
pay for it rather than as an answer to the speed. It takes neither an empty
tool list nor a read-only sandbox, and cleanup.py now says so plainly
instead of implying parity; what it gets is a project of its own, the home
directory, and its slash commands off.
Three things were already wrong and are fixed on the way past, because the
new providers walk the same paths: doctor raised KeyError on the local
model, whose executable is ""; the history recorded Claude's model whoever
answered; and every agent row read "asked Claude".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>