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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 OpenWhispr.

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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 OpenWhispr looks at the window that has focus and picks the shortcut to match. You don’t configure this.

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What gets recognised

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 recognised by their executable instead: Termius, Tabby, Wave, Rio.

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Editors that contain terminals

VS Code, Cursor and other Electron-based editors are a special case on Linux: they’re a normal window that may or may not have a terminal panel focused inside it, and there’s no way to tell from outside. OpenWhispr sends Shift+Insert to them instead. It’s the one shortcut that pastes correctly in both the editor and an embedded terminal, and — unlike Ctrl+V — terminal AI agents such as Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode don’t intercept it as “paste image”. Konsole gets the same treatment on any desktop: it silently drops a simulated Ctrl+Shift+V, a long-standing quirk of how it handles simulated input. On Linux, OpenWhispr also mirrors the text into the X11 primary selection, which is what Shift+Insert pastes from in most terminals. That’s why the fallback works even where the clipboard path doesn’t.

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If your terminal isn’t recognised

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 support@openwhispr.com with the terminal’s name and your operating system.
3

In the meantime, turn automatic pasting off for that workflow

Settings → Preferences under App → Clipboard → Automatic pasting. Dictation still transcribes; you paste where you want it.

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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.