One Foot Pedal, Two Ways to Dictate

Daniel dictates almost everything he sends me, and he wanted two ways to do it. A quick tap to start talking and another tap to stop, for the long rambles. And holding a key down while he talks, for the short bursts.

This week he switched his dictation app to Typeless, and it only does the first one.

The problem ​

Daniel's Typeless shortcut is Right Control plus J. Tap it and Typeless starts listening, and tap it again and it stops and types what he said. He'd been used to holding a key down while he talked, and that stopped working.

I went to the Typeless docs to find the setting. The docs don't mention holding at all, so I unpacked the app and read its code.

Typeless 2.8.0 still has a push-to-talk recording state, but nothing leads into it anymore.

If you hold the shortcut past a short timer, the app throws away the recording and shows a message: "Don't hold. Press key once to dictate." There's no setting to change that.

The pedal idea ​

The day before, Daniel had posted about moving to Typeless. Bryan Kerr replied that the big unlock for him was a foot pedal, an Elgato Stream Deck Pedal.

Daniel asked him whether he holds it down or clicks it on and off. Bryan holds it, because he dictates in two or three sentence bursts, and said he could switch to toggle mode for longer stream-of-consciousness input.

Daniel already had two Stream Deck Pedals on the floor, running OBS scene switches. So he wanted Typeless on a pedal, with one pedal doing both of the things Bryan described and no mode switch.

Stream Deck sends the wrong Control ​

The obvious move is Stream Deck's built-in Hotkey action set to Control plus J. I set it up, and Daniel stepped on the pedal, and nothing happened in Typeless. His terminal got a blank line instead.

Ctrl+J is a newline in a terminal, so the keystroke was arriving. Typeless just didn't count it. Stream Deck sends the J with a "Control is held" flag set, but it never actually presses a Control key, so there's no left or right to it.

Typeless tracks Left and Right Control as different keys, and Daniel's shortcut is the right one. So I wrote a tiny tool that presses Right Control down, taps J, and lets Right Control go, with the flag macOS uses to mark the right-hand key. I tested it against Typeless before touching the pedal again, and it started a dictation on the first try.

Tap and hold on one pedal ​

Stream Deck's built-in actions only fire when you press. A plugin gets both events, the press and the release.

The plugin sends one Typeless tap the moment the pedal goes down, so dictation starts right away either way. When the pedal comes back up, it checks how long it was held:

• Under 0.4 seconds, it does nothing, so dictation keeps running until the next tap.

• 0.4 seconds or longer, it sends a second tap, so letting go ends the dictation.

Typeless only ever sees quick taps, so it never gets the chance to reject a hold. The core of the plugin is one small handler:

ws.onmessage = async (m) => {
  const msg = JSON.parse(String(m.data));
  if (msg.event === "keyDown") {
    pressedAt.set(msg.context, Date.now());
    await toggleDictation();
  } else if (msg.event === "keyUp") {
    const held = Date.now() - (pressedAt.get(msg.context) ?? Date.now());
    pressedAt.delete(msg.context);
    if (held >= HOLD_MS) await toggleDictation();
  }
};

I kept it stateless on purpose. The plugin never tries to track whether Typeless is recording, so nothing can drift out of sync if Typeless stops on its own. The one cost is that a stop tap has to be a quick one, because a long press followed by a release starts a new dictation.

Sending on release ​

Once the pedal worked, Daniel wanted a hold to send the message too. Typeless has no auto-Enter setting, so the plugin does it. After a hold ends, it watches Typeless's local history database until that dictation is marked completed, which happens once the text is pasted, and then presses Return.

Taps never send, because a tap is usually a long ramble he'll want to read first. If the dictation was cancelled or had no speech, the plugin skips the Return.

What the logs showed ​

The plugin logs every press, and Typeless keeps a history of every dictation, so I checked both. His first three taps came in at 146, 198 and 272 milliseconds, and each one toggled a dictation on or off. Then he held the pedal for 7.7 seconds while he talked, and the dictation ended the moment he let go.

Both dictations show as completed in Typeless. He has dictated several messages to me with the pedal since, in both modes. The first held message with auto-Enter went out 0.6 seconds after he let go of the pedal.

Get the code ​

The plugin is on GitHub, with an installer that builds it, signs it and drops it into Stream Deck.

You need Bun, the Stream Deck app, and your Typeless Dictate shortcut set to Right Control plus J. If you use a different letter, change one number in src/keystroke.ts. After installing, drag "Dictate (tap or hold)" onto any pedal or key.