Settings Overview

Settings Sections

The Settings sidebar contains Recording, Speech model, Text output, Cleanup, Word corrections, Text shortcuts, Media, Permissions, Appearance, and General. Start with Permissions and Recording; open Speech model if transcription is not set up.

Save Behavior

Most settings remain in a draft until you choose Save changes. Moving between sections or leaving and returning to Settings keeps the draft. Discard restores the saved preferences. If another update conflicts with your draft, discard it to reload current values before editing again. If the settings file can't be written, Steno doesn't report the save: your changes stay unsaved, with Save changes and Discard still available.

Appearance changes save immediately. Model selection has its own action: save or discard pending changes before switching models. Permission prompts and changes in macOS System Settings are separate from the Steno draft.

Recommended Baseline

Keep Option hold-to-talk enabled, choose an available hands-free key, and start with the included Small model. Leave clipboard backup available for recovery. Enable the live transcript only if you want provisional text during recording; nearby-text continuation is a separate opt-in.

After saving a change, try a dictation in your editor. Test setup, under Speech model → Advanced setup and diagnostics, transcribes a short test clip with the main engine and the fallback tool and reports each step. You still need to record a sentence in your editor to check recording and insertion.