The one gesture
Hold Ctrl+Win (Ctrl+Option on a Mac), speak, release, and the text lands at the caret of whatever has focus. That is the whole product; everything else is a variation on it, reached by holding the same key and pressing a letter. This page lists the gestures, the modes behind them — free mode, screen grab, meeting, translate, dictionary quick-add and screen recording — and what the recording bar and the tray icon do while a screen recording is running.
The one gesture
Hold Ctrl+Win, speak, release. The text lands at the caret of whatever has focus and your
clipboard is put back. That is the product; everything below is a variation on it.
Double-tap Ctrl+Win for free mode — it keeps recording until you double-tap again, then pastes
the finished note at the caret, leaves it on the clipboard, and saves it under .deixis\notes\.
Hold the chord and the mode palette appears above the listening pill: one chip per mode, with
its letter. Eight ship — S screen grab, N hands-free note, M meeting, V screen recording,
F free mode, D dictionary, T translate and C Claude usage — and the authoritative list is
the ACTIONS table in core/src/hotkey.rs, not this paragraph. They are defaults: [mode_keys]
in your config reassigns them, and a mode the platform cannot do is dropped rather than shown.
The letters stay live for 5 s after the chord engages (ACTION_WINDOW_MS) and the palette fades
exactly when they stop working — later than that, S is a letter again. Press the letter while the
chord is held, or click the chip. DEIXIS_ACTION_KEYS=off hands the letters back to typing, custom
buttons included.
| Gesture | Mode | What you get |
|---|---|---|
Hold Ctrl+Win |
Dictation | Cleaned text at the caret, in whatever app has focus. |
Double-tap Ctrl+Win, or Ctrl+Win+F |
Free mode | Narrate while collecting selections, grabs and picked elements; one note that interleaves what you said with what you pointed at, pasted at the caret and saved. |
Ctrl+Win+S |
Screen grab | Freeze, drag a region, quick-save or annotate — see Screen capture. |
Ctrl+Win+M |
Meeting | Record mic and system audio, transcribed on this machine — see Meeting mode. |
Ctrl+Win+T |
Translate | The selection translated in a popup at the cursor, with Copy and Replace. Needs a cleanup endpoint. |
Ctrl+Win+D |
Dictionary quick-add | A selected word or short phrase goes straight into your vocabulary; with nothing selected, a type-a-word popup opens. |
Ctrl+Win+V |
Screen recording | Records the screen you are on to an MP4 in .deixis\recordings\; the same chord stops and saves it. |
Ctrl+Win+N |
Hands-free note | Narrate a note without collecting anything; it is pasted at the caret and saved. |
Ctrl+Win+C |
Claude usage | How much of the signed-in Claude account's plan is left, in a popup by the cursor. Reads nothing and changes nothing: no microphone, no selection. |
Keep reading
From the blog
Teach dictation your vocabulary: names, jargon and acronyms
When dictation mangles names, jargon and acronyms, a custom vocabulary fixes it. How to teach Deixis your words, which to add, and why the list is capped.
How to type by voice in any app on a Mac, with the speech recognised on the Mac itself
How to type by voice in any app on a Mac: hold Ctrl+Option, speak, let go. Speech recognition runs on your Mac, free and with no account.
Hold a key. Speak. Keep working.
Deixis is free, needs no account, and runs on your own device.
v1.2.2 · 64‑bit Windows 10/11 · macOS 13 on Apple silicon · 51 MB · nothing else to install · also for Windows