User interface

The TUI keeps one production transcription path while restoring the polished three-tab workflow.

Tabs

• Record shows live elapsed recording time, provisional chunk text, authoritative final text, processing metadata, and copy control. The first provisional update normally appears at the first confirmed pause after about 25 seconds; later updates follow each processed chunk.
• History presents recordings as a compact timestamp timeline, selects the newest entry automatically, and keeps status/duration metadata separate from the transcript text.
• Settings controls recording, Markdown, and artifact-cache paths; filename prefix; theme; automatic copy; and the compositor-managed global shortcut. Saving reloads the verified resident deployment when necessary.

The theme selector includes the built-in Textual palettes, with tokyo-night as the default. The header intentionally reports the compact runtime identity Parakeet v3 · NVIDIA CUDA · FP16 instead of the full physical GPU name.

States

• Loading — verifies artifacts, admits CUDA, loads and warms Parakeet.
• Ready — the model is resident and recording can begin immediately.
• Recording — canonical audio is continuously persisted while CPU VAD and bounded inference may proceed concurrently.
• Finalizing — capture stops, the WAV is finalized, remaining descriptors are processed, and one authoritative result is assembled.
• Error — the requested contract could not be preserved; there is no CPU fallback.

Keys

The local voicepad toggle command sends the same start/stop action to a running TUI over a user-only Unix socket. Desktop environments may bind that command to a global shortcut. External toggles switch to the Record tab and update one native recording, transcribing, or completion status card while another application has focus. See Global desktop shortcut.

While recording, the header displays elapsed time in seconds and then minutes. The TUI and recording CLI also monitor capture health. If the microphone stream or durable writer fails, they stop waiting immediately, finalize the maximum valid partial WAV, and mark the result incomplete. --no-transcribe reports a partial WAV as an error rather than claiming an ordinary successful save.

Quitting the TUI with an active recording uses the same finalization and Markdown persistence path as an explicit stop. If WAV publication itself fails, the operation spool remains recoverable and its location is recorded in the private session log. Incomplete text is never copied automatically.