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System Tray & Shortcuts

Eloquent Notes is designed as a background Linux system tray utility. It runs unobtrusively in your desktop panel and can be controlled either via system tray mouse clicks or global system-wide keyboard shortcuts.

System Tray Interaction Flow

The system tray icon provides immediate visual status feedback and quick access to application controls.

Mouse Interactions

  • Left Click (Trigger): Toggles recording state.
  • If Idle \(\rightarrow\) Starts audio recording.
  • If Recording \(\rightarrow\) Stops audio recording and initiates background LLM processing.
  • If Processing \(\rightarrow\) Shows a DBus desktop notification informing that the system is busy.
  • Right Click (Context Menu): Opens the context menu with the following options:
  • Start/Stop Recording (Bold): Toggles dictation recording.
  • Configuration: Opens the PyQt6 Configuration GUI dialog.
  • Reload Configuration: Dynamically reloads settings from config.yaml without restarting the daemon.
  • Quit: Safely stops ongoing recordings/threads, closes IPC servers, and exits the application.

Visual Status Indicators

The tray icon dynamically changes color and symbol to indicate the active state:

Status Icon Appearance Tooltip Label Description
Idle Gray Circle + White Microphone Eloquent Notes (Idle) The daemon is listening for input commands. No audio input is active.
Recording Red Circle + White Recording Dot Eloquent Notes (Recording...) Audio input stream is open. Microphone audio is being recorded into memory buffer. Model preloading is dispatched.
Processing Orange Circle + White Hourglass Eloquent Notes (Processing...) Audio recording is closed. The 3-phase Ollama AI pipeline is executing (transcription, rewriting, classification).

Audible Feedback Beeps

To allow seamless hands-free dictation without looking at your desktop tray icon, Eloquent Notes provides audible tone feedback when recording starts and stops.

Technical Implementation

Audio beeps are generated dynamically using NumPy sound wave synthesis:

  1. Sine-Wave Generation: Generates a pure audio frequency (default 440 Hz, A4 note) over the configured duration (default 0.1 seconds / 100 ms).
  2. Anti-Click Linear Fades: Applies a 10 ms linear fade-in (0.0 to 1.0) at the start and a 10 ms linear fade-out (1.0 to 0.0) at the end of the waveform array. This eliminates sharp voltage steps that cause harsh speaker clicking artifacts.
  3. Sound Playback: Output is played asynchronously through sounddevice using float32 PCM precision.
# Pure sine wave with 10ms anti-click envelope
t = np.linspace(0, duration, int(sample_rate * duration), False)
sine_wave = np.sin(frequency * t * 2 * np.pi)

fade_len = min(int(sample_rate * 0.01), len(sine_wave) // 2)
if fade_len > 0:
    sine_wave[:fade_len] *= np.linspace(0.0, 1.0, fade_len)
    sine_wave[-fade_len:] *= np.linspace(1.0, 0.0, fade_len)

Audible beeps can be customized or disabled entirely in the Audio tab of the Configuration GUI or in config.yaml.

Global Keyboard Shortcuts Setup

Because Linux desktop environments handle global hotkeys independently, Eloquent Notes provides the decoupled eloquent-notes toggle CLI command. You can bind this command to your preferred global shortcut key in any desktop environment.

1. GNOME Desktop (Ubuntu, Fedora, Workstation)

  1. Open Settings \(\rightarrow\) Keyboard.
  2. Scroll down and click View and Customize Shortcuts \(\rightarrow\) Custom Shortcuts.
  3. Click + (Add Shortcut).
  4. Fill out the dialog:
  5. Name: Eloquent Notes Toggle
  6. Command: eloquent-notes toggle (or ~/.local/bin/eloquent-notes toggle if installed via uv / pipx)
  7. Shortcut: Press your preferred key combination (e.g. Super + Alt + R or Ctrl + Alt + Space).
  8. Click Add.

2. KDE Plasma Desktop

  1. Open System Settings \(\rightarrow\) Shortcuts (or Custom Shortcuts).
  2. Click Add New \(\rightarrow\) Global Shortcut \(\rightarrow\) Command/URL.
  3. Set the trigger key in the Trigger tab (e.g. Meta + Shift + R).
  4. Set the command in the Action tab: eloquent-notes toggle.
  5. Click Apply.

3. i3 / Sway Window Managers

Add the execution rule to your window manager configuration file:

For i3 (~/.config/i3/config):

# Toggle Eloquent Notes Dictation
bindsym $mod+Mod1+r exec --no-startup-id eloquent-notes toggle

For Sway (~/.config/sway/config):

# Toggle Eloquent Notes Dictation
bindsym $mod+Mod1+r exec eloquent-notes toggle

Reload your window manager configuration ($mod+Shift+r for i3 or swaymsg reload). Pressing the shortcut will instantly start or stop dictation.