Handy Dictation Kit

Local, $0, fully-offline dictation for developers -- configured so it does not misfire.

Handy (github.com/cjpais/handy) is an excellent MIT-licensed speech-to-text app: Whisper/Parakeet on-device, auto-paste at the cursor, works in terminals. But three of its sharpest edges are undocumented, and each presents as dictation randomly doing weird things.

THE SILENT FAILURES. (1) Bare-modifier hotkeys fire on key-DOWN with no tap detection: bound to bare ctrl, every Ctrl+C starts or stops a recording -- measured live, six stray recordings in seventeen seconds, each pasting a fragment of room audio into the focused app. (2) Left-command is a self-triggering loop: Handy pastes by synthesizing a left-command keystroke and its listener does not filter its own events, so every auto-paste would start a new recording. Hard-blocked, no override. (3) Clipped words at both ends: the mic stream takes most of a second to open (measured 872 ms) and stopping cuts the final word in flight -- two of Handy's own settings fix both, and the kit knows which.

WHAT SHIPS: a setup CLI that refuses the traps and explains each refusal; a doctor; a schema-checked settings writer that backs up first and FAILS CLOSED with named keys when Handy's auto-updating schema drifts; and a learnable vocabulary CLI over Handy's fuzzy-correction dictionary (generic developer seed included -- no LLM rewriting pass, deliberately: we measured small local models paraphrasing transcripts and pasting their own prompt as output).

For Handy -- not affiliated with or endorsed by its author; never forked, vendored or redistributed. Verified against Handy 0.9.5 and handy-keys 0.3.4, with the upstream source walk and the observed misfire trace shipped in repro/ and the re-verification rule recorded in VERSION.md.

VERIFIED: 24 tests, measured by running the suite.

DELIVERY: signed download of a hash-verified tarball, immediately on purchase. Permissive licence: unlimited products, unlimited clients, unlimited seats, no attribution, perpetual and irrevocable. One restriction, do not republish the source as source.