Hiding the indicator unmapped its window, so KWin tore that window down and
built a new one for the next dictation. On a tiled desktop the compositor
repainted whatever sat underneath as it went, and the terminal behind
visibly flinched every time a transcript landed. Measured with a KWin
script: five show-and-hide rounds raised five windowAdded and five
windowRemoved events, where there is now one of each for the life of the
process.
So the window stays mapped and paints nothing while idle. That has to be a
real repaint rather than zero opacity: with the animation timer stopped
nothing else damages the surface, and the stale frame sat on the screen
until something unrelated, moving the mouse, made the compositor redraw it.
The timer was also left running after the indicator went away, ticking
thirty times a second over a window nobody could see. It stops now, and the
finished message lingers for two seconds rather than one.
The cleanup prompt now asks the model to fix words the transcriber misheard
when the context makes the intended one clear, and to leave them alone when
it does not. Speech models fail phonetically on proper nouns, and that is
exactly what context can recover.
The names you enter for the transcription hint are handed to the cleanup
model as a glossary too. Knowing the spelling is what lets it recognise
"kuber netis" as Kubernetes.
A failed cleanup used to be almost invisible: the raw transcript was pasted
and a progress line flashed by, so a rejected key looked exactly like
working dictation for days. It now leaves the indicator amber with the
reason, sends a notification, and records the error in the history. HTTP
401, 402 and 429 are reported as what they are, naming the service.
Also:
- Settings can test the OpenRouter key, not just the OpenAI one
- Tray menu and CLI gained Restart, which re-execs in place
- Defaults saved into the config by older versions are recognised by their
fingerprint and dropped, so an untouched prompt keeps getting improvements
- The IPC socket is user-only; Qt puts it in /tmp
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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