Pilcrow

Help

Install & help

Getting set up, the two permissions, and the handful of things that commonly go wrong.

Installing

Three steps: open the disk image, drag Pilcrow to Applications, and launch it. It appears in the menu bar rather than the Dock, so do not go looking for it there.

It requires macOS 26 or later. The on-device speech recognition it is built on does not exist in earlier versions, so it will not run on Sonoma or Sequoia.

Permissions

Pilcrow needs two, and neither can be granted automatically — macOS deliberately requires you to do it yourself.

Microphone

Prompted the first time you dictate. If you dismissed the prompt, turn it on at System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone.

Accessibility

This one is needed twice over: to watch for the trigger key at all, and to send ⌘V to other applications. Without it, the hotkey does nothing and transcripts land on the clipboard instead of in your text field.

Grant it at:

System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility

The path matters. macOS has two different panes called “Accessibility”. The top-level one — for VoiceOver, Zoom, and display settings — is not the one you want, and Pilcrow will never appear there. The correct pane is inside Privacy & Security. This trips up nearly everyone, including the person who wrote the app.

Find Pilcrow in the list and switch it on. No restart is needed — the app notices within a couple of seconds and enables the hotkey itself.

Using it

  • Tap Right Option once to start listening, once again to stop.
  • A panel appears in a corner of the screen with a live transcript. It never takes keyboard focus.
  • When you stop, the text is pasted into whatever field had focus when you started.
  • If nothing editable was focused, or Accessibility is not granted, the transcript goes to your clipboard rather than being lost.

Holding the trigger key still works normally. Dictation only fires on a clean tap — under 700 ms with no other key pressed — so Right Option keeps working as a modifier for typing accented characters.

Changing the trigger key

In Settings → General → Hotkey. Four keys are available:

  • Right Option — the default.
  • Right Command.
  • Right Shift.
  • Right Control — note that laptop keyboards do not have this key. Only useful with an external keyboard.

Only right-hand modifiers are offered, and that is deliberate. The left-hand ones are held constantly while typing, so nearly every gesture would be interpreted as a hold rather than a tap and the trigger would feel broken.

Arbitrary combinations like ⌃⇧D are not supported. Recognising a modifier tap — which is what keeps the key usable for its normal job — is a different mechanism from matching a chord.

Languages

Choose one in Settings → Dictation. Pilcrow offers whatever Apple’s speech models support on your Mac, currently around 30 languages.

The first time you use a new language, macOS downloads its model — a few hundred megabytes, once. The panel shows progress while this happens. After that the language works offline.

If your Mac is set to a regional variant with no model of its own — English (Netherlands), for example — Pilcrow resolves it to the closest supported one rather than failing.

Troubleshooting

The hotkey does nothing

Almost always Accessibility. Check System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility — and make sure you are in the pane inside Privacy & Security, not the top-level Accessibility section.

If Pilcrow is already listed and switched on, switch it off and on again. macOS occasionally holds a stale entry after an app is replaced.

Text goes to the clipboard instead of the text field

That is the deliberate fallback for when pasting is not possible. Two causes: Accessibility is not granted, or the thing you were focused on is not an editable field. The transcript is never thrown away — paste it yourself with ⌘V.

It is also a setting. Check that Settings → General → When dictation ends is set to “Paste into focused field” rather than “Copy to clipboard only”.

Nothing is heard

Check the Microphone permission, then check which input device macOS is using in System Settings → Sound → Input. Pilcrow uses the system default input, so a disconnected headset will take the audio with it.

The trigger fires when I did not mean it to

If you use the trigger key often on its own, switch to a different one in Settings → General → Hotkey. Right Shift and Right Command are both good alternatives.

It stopped working after a while

macOS can disable an app’s key watcher if the system is under load. Pilcrow detects this and re-enables itself, but if the hotkey is dead and Accessibility is granted, quitting and relaunching from the menu bar will always restore it.

Uninstalling

Quit Pilcrow from the menu bar, then drag it from Applications to the Trash. To remove its preferences as well:

defaults delete com.thealphacircuit.Pilcrow

The permission entries can be removed by switching Pilcrow off in the Privacy & Security panes. Speech models are managed by macOS and shared with other apps, so removing Pilcrow leaves them in place.

Still stuck

If none of the above helped, write to support@thealphacircuit.com. Say which version of macOS you are on and what you saw — that is usually enough to work it out.