Hotkeys

Murmur works system-wide via global hotkeys — no matter which app is in focus, pressing your shortcut triggers recording. There are three independent hotkey slots:

Each slot remembers its own shortcut and its own press mode, so dictation can be Auto while notes stay Push-to-Talk.

Setting a shortcut

1. Open the relevant settings pane and click the hotkey field.
2. Press the key or combination you want. It saves immediately.
3. Use the Clear (X) button to remove it.

Two shapes of shortcut work:

• Key + modifiers — ⌘⇧D, ⌃F5, and similar combinations
• Modifier-only — a bare modifier key (⌘, ⌥, ⌃, ⇧, or Fn) pressed alone

Left and right modifier differentiation

The recorder is position-aware: it captures which physical modifier you pressed. Assign Right Option (shown as "R⌥") and the left Option key keeps its normal job entirely. A single physical key press is the most ergonomic trigger there is — see the Right Option notes below before committing to it.

Conflict rules

When you record a new shortcut, Murmur validates it against the other two slots — dictation, command, and notes must all differ, and the settings pane warns you directly in the field if they clash.

One subtlety: a modifier-only shortcut recorded without a side ("any Option") conflicts with a side-specific one ("Right Option") — they overlap on every right-Option press, so Murmur treats them as the same key.

Murmur cannot detect shortcuts claimed by other apps. If a combination seems dead, check whether another app registered it first, and pick something less contested.

How global hotkeys work

Murmur uses a passive, listen-only event tap that watches solely for your configured shortcuts — no keystrokes are logged or stored. The tap is active whenever a shortcut is configured.

This requires the Input Monitoring permission. Without it, global hotkeys fail silently — no error dialog, the shortcut simply does nothing outside Murmur (shortcuts still work while the Murmur window itself is frontmost, which can make the problem confusing). If your hotkey works in Murmur but nowhere else, that is the signature: grant Input Monitoring in System Settings > Privacy & Security > Input Monitoring, then restart Murmur.

Self-healing hotkeys

(New in 1.6) Occasionally macOS drops a key event or temporarily disables an app's keyboard monitor — under heavy load, after waking from sleep, or during a security prompt. In the past that could leave a hotkey "stuck" (Murmur thinking a key was still held) or unresponsive. Murmur now recovers from both automatically:

• If a key-release event is lost, a watchdog notices the key is no longer physically down and releases it for you, so the next press works normally.
• If the system disables Murmur's keyboard monitor, Murmur re-enables it — and rebuilds it if it goes missing — on its own.

This applies to all three hotkeys (dictation, command, and notes). In practice you shouldn't notice it happening; hotkeys just keep working.

While recording: Escape and Shift

During any recording, Escape and Shift act as control keys — single Esc steps down to a raw paste in dictation mode, double Esc cancels, and a bare Shift tap flips between Dictation and Command mode. The full gesture table lives in Recording Indicator.

Cancelling is not destructive: a cancelled recording above a minimum length is kept in History (marked cancelled) with its audio, so you can transcribe it later if you change your mind.

Using Right Option as your hotkey

R⌥ is the most popular choice — one physical key, tap to toggle, hold to push-to-talk. A few behaviors worth knowing:

• It triggers on every right-Option press, including combos. Pressing ⌥+arrow or typing international characters (umlauts, ñ, €, ₹) with the right Option key starts a recording. If you type accented characters, do it with left Option — position-awareness means left Option never triggers.
• Quick double-taps are absorbed. Presses within 300 ms count as one (this guards against event glitches), so an extremely fast tap-tap won't stop a toggle recording — pause a beat and tap again.
• A stuck recording is always recoverable. In rare cases involving both Option keys held together, releasing them in a crossed order can leave a push-to-talk recording running. One clean R⌥ tap, or Escape, stops it.

If any of this bites you regularly, a key-plus-modifier combination like ⌘⇧D sidesteps all of it at the cost of a second finger.