Notepad and the command line

The notepad

Open it from the tray menu, or with sotto --notepad.

Press Record, speak, and the formatted text accumulates in the window. A Copy button puts the whole thing on the clipboard.

Use it when:

• You are drafting, and want to see everything before it goes anywhere
• The target application does not accept synthesised keystrokes
• You are dictating into something across a remote session
• You just want the words somewhere neutral

The formatting is identical to normal dictation — the same pause-driven paragraphs, the same commands, the same cleanup.

The command line

Sotto runs as a single background process. Invoking sotto again does not start a second copy: it forwards the command to the running one and exits.

sotto --toggle     # start or stop dictation
sotto --settings   # open Settings
sotto --notepad    # open the Notepad
sotto --quit       # quit

Binding your own shortcut

sotto --toggle is the escape hatch when the built-in global shortcut is not available — on a desktop without the GlobalShortcuts portal, or when you want a compositor-level binding instead.

Disable Sotto’s own shortcut in Settings → Shortcut, then bind sotto --toggle in your desktop’s shortcut settings (System Settings → Shortcuts → Custom on KDE), or in your compositor’s config on Hyprland and friends.

D-Bus

A running Sotto exposes net.mauvely.Sotto on the session bus at /Sotto, with these methods:

Method	Does
Toggle	Start or stop dictation
Stop	Stop dictation
ShowSettings	Open Settings
ShowNotepad	Open the Notepad
Quit	Quit

The command-line flags above are thin wrappers over these, so anything that can talk to the session bus can drive Sotto — a hardware button, a Stream Deck, an editor plugin, a script.

busctl --user call net.mauvely.Sotto /Sotto net.mauvely.Sotto Toggle

The tray icon

Sotto lives in the system tray. Its menu opens Settings, opens the Notepad, and quits.

Starting at login

Settings → General → Launch at login registers Sotto to start with your session, so the shortcut is available without you thinking about it.