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Manual Windows

Editors, IDEs and terminals

Why terminals need a different paste shortcut, which ones Neato Echo recognizes, and what to do when yours isn't recognized.

Dictating into a code editor is the same as dictating into anything else. Terminals are the exception, and the reason is a keyboard shortcut rather than anything about Neato Echo.

Why terminals are different

Ctrl+V means "paste" almost everywhere. In a terminal it has meant something else since long before graphical desktops, so terminals moved paste onto Ctrl+Shift+V. Send the wrong one and you get nothing, or a control character.

So Neato Echo looks at the window that has focus and picks the shortcut to match. You don't configure this.

What gets recognized

By window class: Windows Terminal, the classic console host (Command Prompt and PowerShell), ConEmu, mintty (Git Bash), PuTTY, Alacritty, WezTerm, kitty, Hyper, MobaXterm.

Electron-based terminals all share one window class, so they're recognized by their executable instead: Termius, Tabby, Wave, Rio.

Editors that contain terminals

VS Code, Cursor and other editors are a normal window as far as Windows is concerned, so they receive the ordinary Ctrl+V. That pastes correctly into the editor itself. If you're dictating into a terminal panel inside the editor and the text doesn't land, click into the panel and press Ctrl+Shift+V — the text is on your clipboard.

If your terminal isn't recognized

You'll see one of two things: nothing pasted, or the text appearing somewhere unexpected.

  1. Paste it yourself

    The text is on your clipboard. Ctrl+Shift+V puts it in.

  2. Tell us which terminal

    Recognition is a list of names, so adding yours is a small change. Email [email protected] with the terminal's name, or open an issue on GitHub.

  3. In the meantime, turn automatic pasting off for that workflow

    SettingsPreferences under AppClipboardAutomatic pasting. Dictation still transcribes; you paste where you want it.

Dictating code

Worth setting expectations: transcription models are trained on speech, not on source code. Function names, symbols and punctuation-heavy syntax come out approximately at best.

What works well is the prose around code — commit messages, pull-request descriptions, comments, documentation, and prompts to a terminal AI agent. Those are also where most people find the time saving.

The custom dictionary helps with the vocabulary that matters to you: library names, your own product names, the acronyms your team uses.

Still need help?

Write to [email protected] with your Windows version, your Neato Echo version (Settings → System), and what you were doing. A person reads every message.