Settings: Cleanup and Style

Style Profile

Settings → Cleanup applies local rules to recognized text. It offers Structure (natural, paragraph, bullets), Filler removal (minimal, balanced, aggressive), and Commands (passthrough or transform). These preferences use fixed rules and may leave sentences unchanged. Steno 1.0.1 removed the Tone options and the Command and Email structures, which had no effect. A saved Command structure works as Natural and a saved Email structure as Paragraph, and settings that use them still load.

Minimal and Balanced preserve ambiguous spoken phrases such as like and you know, and keep fillers. Choose Aggressive to allow removal of supported fillers. It removes fillers the way the recognizer writes them, such as Um, at the start of a sentence, and gives the sentence's capital to the next word. Aggressive keeps kind of and sort of where they mean "type of", as in "What kind of car is that?". A dictation of only fillers is treated as no speech. Cleanup also handles supported recognition artifacts and repair patterns. Review the result, especially when a filler word is part of what you meant to say.

Spoken corrections such as scratch that and never mind, and paragraph capitalization, apply however confidently the recognizer heard you. Paragraph formatting keeps deliberately lowercase spellings at the start of a dictation, such as iPhone, eBay, and macOS, and a saved spelling such as npm. Bullet formatting doesn't split decimals, thousands separators, email addresses, web addresses, or abbreviations such as Dr. and e.g. into separate bullets.

Phrases such as question mark, open paren, and slash command stay as spoken words. Steno does not interpret every punctuation phrase as a command. The lowercase directive and its literal escape are documented in Recording Modes and Hotkeys.

App Overrides

Add a per-app override using the target app's bundle ID and a style profile, then choose Save changes. Without a matching override, the global profile applies. Command passthrough can preserve slash-prefixed text in IDE context. Verify the actual output in the destination before relying on a rule for executable commands.

History's Run cleanup again action reprocesses a saved transcript the same way live dictation does, including for VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, and Warp. It does not repeat speech recognition, and Restore original cleanup puts back the earlier text.