App losing settings for "Writing key press delay" after a while

[magakis]

Hello,
First of all, I would like to thank everyone who is contributing to this amazing app! It is super useful and I really appreciate your work.

The issue that I have noticed is that after a while, the "Writing key press delay" setting resets to its original value. Currently I have put the setting at 0.01 and I am using pynput on windows. After using it for a while, it slowly starts to increase the delay per keystroke and eventually it feels like it's back to its default value.

If I restart the application, it starts to work like normal, but again, after a while, it starts to increase the delay per keystroke, not adhering to my original settings. My Python version is 3.11.4.

[magakis]

I think that there is actually a general issue where the application is losing its settings and reverting back to the default. I noticed that options like hide terminal or add trailing space are also resetting. I haven't looked at the code, but if there is a section, where if some exception or error is thrown, it will fall back to its default settings, then I believe that this should be removed.

[TomFrankly]

@magakis I believe this is fixed in my fork: https://github.com/TomFrankly/whisper-writer/tree/main

More accurately, I coded around it. I felt virtual keyboard input via pynput wasn't actually a good method of inputting text in about 98% of my use, so I added a "threshold" setting. If the transcribed text is over X characters (set in the threshold), the app will paste the text instantly from the clipboard instead of "typing" it out.

IIRC, it also restores the previous contents of your clipboard. So the upshot is that text pastes instantaneously, so long as you set the threshold to something low, like 1 character. I did that instead of switching fully to clipboard-based input in order to leave the door open for cool stuff in the future like adding text-expansion, which would rely on virtually-typed key combos.

I haven't noticed the settings reverting either, though I'm probably not the best source on that since I do the vast majority of my work on macOS. IIRC, the settings are always saved to a config.yaml file on your machine, so they should persist as long as nothing deletes or clears that file.

[magakis]

@TomFrankly Thank you very much for pointing me to your fork Tom!

I am not sure whether this issue is fixed in your fork as I haven't used it much yet, but I will definitely start using it as it adds many quality of life improvements.. and I really like how you added the distill versions as well 👍🏻

[TomFrankly]

@TomFrankly thanks! Yeah I basically added every cool/QoL feature I could think of over a 2-week vibe coding bender. It was the first time I'd ever worked with Python or Cursor. The whole adventure went pretty well, though once I tried making the app macOS-compatible, the project got too complex for even the latest LLMs.

I also added a couple security upgrades. API keys are stored using Keyring (IIRC savbell's current version uses config storage, which is still local but doesn't leverage OS-level key management). And I also added more warnings and required settings-hurdles before Continuous mode will work while sending data to any API.

[magakis]

This is very strange and I managed to pinpoint the issue further. I see in my config.yaml file that condition_on_previous_text: false yet when I open the application, the "condition on previous text" is turned ON. There is a tick in the checkbox. I'm thinking that maybe it is a permissions error somehow. I have placed the whole project in my Documents folder and maybe that has something to do with it.

@TomFrankly I noticed the exact same bugs in your project as well, so that's why I believe that it is coming from some permissions error.

Just putting this out there in case somebody has a fix. I will try to move the project to a different folder to see whether I would get different results.

Python v3.13.3

[magakis]

Well, nope. I just tested placing it in my home directory and still the condition on previous text is always turned on no matter what.

[TomFrankly]

@magakis is condition_on_previous_text the only config option that's losing its saved value?

[TomFrankly]

(P.S. in the likely case I never get the time to debug this and push a patch on my fork, you can edit the default values directly in the src/config_schema.yaml file using a text editor. This won't help for saving API keys, but it should work for anything else.)

[magakis]

@TomFrankly Thanks! That was actually a great suggestion! It looks like config_schema.yaml settings persist much better than the 'config.yaml' settings.

I can put these settings as false in config.yaml but they would still be true in the app. Altering the config_schema.yaml worked in actually having these settings turned false. I'm talking specifically about:

• Print to terminal
• Condition on previous text
• Add trailing space

[TomFrankly]

@magakis interesting! This gets into the dreaded "works on my machine" territory, as the settings that get written to config.yaml work just fine for me. During my bender, I was restarting the app constantly - easily hundreds of times. Never had an issue with configs failing to save/load.

But I know the app is set to pull default values from that config_schema.yaml doc, so you can effectively set anything you want there!