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Escape set my butt on fire: 5 minutes of dictation gone 🔥 #786
Description
What are you trying to do?
Here's what happened to me today.
I started a dictation and began explaining a bug to my coding agent. While talking I was walking through the app myself, clicking around and showing it what was going on. At some point a modal popped up and, out of habit, I hit Escape to close it.
At that exact moment I heard the sound of Hex stopping the recording.
By then I'd been talking for about five minutes. I nervously opened Hex's History, and it wasn't there. Nothing. Everything I'd just said was gone.
This was my reaction:
What would help?
Keep a cancelled dictation in History for a short while, say a minute, with a visible countdown, and then let it burn.
- If I pressed Escape on purpose, no harm done: it disappears from History on its own a minute later.
- If I pressed Escape by accident, I can open History and copy my text instead of starting five minutes of talking from scratch.
Escape is the key everyone hits to close things, so during a long hands-free dictation it's very easy to press it for something else. Right now, the longer I talk, the more a single keypress can wipe out, and there's no way back.
P.S. Guys, you're awesome and Hex is just insane. I use it all day and I'm absolutely hooked.
That's exactly why losing five minutes of talking makes me cry 🥲
Activity
ahatzz11 commentedon Nov 1, 2026
Second escape press for cancelling would be incredible. The "careful you are about to do something dangerous" noise would be a good add.
thdxr commentedon Nov 1, 2026
when you press escape during a capture, hex throws the audio away right there. nothing gets transcribed, so there's no text for history to keep. history also only stores dictations that actually pasted, so keeping cancelled ones means transcribing audio you asked us to drop, or holding raw audio we don't keep by default. on linux cancel is already a key you pick in your desktop settings, but on macos and windows escape always cancels while recording.
cancelled jobs are never transcribed, pasted or saved, so this changes what cancel means on every os
keeping the cancelled audio around even for a minute goes against not saving captured audio by default
a five minute clip still has to transcribe after the cancel, so the countdown would start late and use the model while you're dictating again
would it be enough if escape on a long locked or toggle dictation needed a second press to discard it, instead of getting it back in history afterwards?
would be useful to know which os you're on, since escape works differently on each
— from 𝕺𝖕𝖊𝖓𝕮𝖔𝖉𝖊
trin4ik commentedon Nov 1, 2026
My bad, should have said: I'm on the stable 3.0.1, macOS 26.2.
And yes, a second press would totally do it. The key part for me is the first Escape: it should make some distinct sound, one I'd recognize as "careful, you're about to drop this recording". That would stop me right away, and I'd instantly remember my burning butt 🔥
Then the second Escape actually cancels the recording. Agreed, that's exactly what cancel should be.
Remove dictation cancel: Escape ends nothing (#786) (#795)
thdxr commentedon Nov 1, 2026
escape no longer cancels anything. it doesn't end a recording or a queued dictation on any os, so dictations always finish and paste.
hex dictation canceland the linux cancel shortcut are gone too. it's in the next dev build (#795)— from 𝕺𝖕𝖊𝖓𝕮𝖔𝖉𝖊