noctwhspr

Noctalia companion for hyprwhspr — native speech-to-text for Linux. hyprwhspr is fast, accurate, private, system-wide dictation: press a hotkey, talk, and your words land in whatever you were typing — transcribed by local in-memory models (Whisper, Parakeet) that never leave your machine, or by top cloud APIs if you point it there. Its visuals even theme themselves to match your Noctalia theme.

This plugin puts hyprwhspr on your bar: the widget shows the dictation state at a glance, left-click starts or stops a recording, and right-click restarts the hyprwhspr service if it ever gets stuck.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	goodroot/noctwhspr
Entries	Bar widget: status

Requirements

Install hyprwhspr and set it up so its hyprwhspr.service systemd user service exists. The widget drives hyprwhspr's own tray script (hyprwhspr-tray.sh), which it looks up under the install root — /usr/lib/hyprwhspr for the Arch/AUR package. Nothing else is needed; the widget has no network access of its own.

Usage

Enable the plugin in Settings → Plugins, then add the status widget to your bar in Settings → Bar.

The glyph tracks the dictation state reported by hyprwhspr:

Glyph	State
Filled record dot (error color)	Recording — dictation is capturing audio
Microphone (primary color)	Ready — service is up, waiting for a hotkey or click
Zzz	Model unloaded — first recording will load it
Microphone off	Service stopped
Warning triangle	Error — the tooltip explains what is wrong

Interactions:

• Left-click — toggle recording (same as the hyprwhspr hotkey). If the service is stopped, this starts it first.
• Right-click — restart the hyprwhspr.service systemd user service.
• Hover — the tooltip shows the detailed status line, including error reasons when something is wrong.

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
root	string	/usr/lib/hyprwhspr	Directory hyprwhspr is installed under. Leave at the default unless hyprwhspr lives at a non-standard prefix; HYPRWHSPR_ROOT in Noctalia's environment is also honored.

Notes

• The widget is a thin shim over hyprwhspr's tray script — the same script that backs its Waybar module — so state detection stays in one place. It polls <root>/config/hyprland/hyprwhspr-tray.sh status every 2 seconds and renders the returned JSON.
• Spawned processes: the tray script on every poll and click; the script in turn queries systemctl --user and hyprwhspr's runtime state files. Right-click runs systemctl --user restart hyprwhspr.service through the script. No network calls and no filesystem writes are made by the plugin itself.
• If the widget shows "hyprwhspr not found", hyprwhspr is not installed at the configured root — point the root setting at your install prefix.
• Works on any compositor Noctalia runs on; the hyprland in the script path is historical, hyprwhspr itself supports Hyprland, Niri and friends.