This page describes Dictum 0.5.

Update and remove¶

How you update or remove Dictum depends on how you installed it. Whichever way you choose, your settings, your downloaded models, your history and the API keys in the keyring stay: an update or a reinstall picks up where you left off. Start fresh says how to delete them as well.

The desktop app tells you when a new version is out: Update available: 0.6.0, with that version, shows in the tray icon's menu and opens its page on GitHub. See Check for updates.

Package names are shown here with <version> in place of the version. The commands set it in a variable first, version=0.5.1: put in the version you downloaded.

Windows installer¶

To update, open the newer dictum-<version>-win-x64.msi. It quits Dictum, replaces it and starts it again.

The installer does not put an older version over a newer one: it says "A newer version of Dictum is already installed." To go back to an older version, remove Dictum first, then install the older one.

To remove:

Open Windows Settings → Apps → Installed apps.
Find Dictum, click … next to it, and click Uninstall.

The uninstaller quits Dictum, and removes the programs, the Start menu entry and the login item.

Windows zip¶

To update:

Quit Dictum: Quit Dictum in the tray menu.
Extract the newer dictum-<version>-win-x64.zip, and copy the files from its dictum-<version>-win-x64 folder into your Dictum folder, for example C:\Tools\Dictum. Let them replace the old files.
Start dictum-gui.exe again.

Keep the same folder: the login item points at it.

To remove:

Turn off Start Dictum at login in Settings → General, if it is on.
Quit Dictum: Quit Dictum in the tray menu.
Delete the folder.

AppImage¶

These steps assume the AppImage lives at ~/Applications/Dictum.AppImage, as Getting started suggests.

To update:

Quit Dictum: Quit Dictum in the tray menu.

Put the new file in place of the old one, under the same name, and make it executable:

version=0.5.1
mv ~/Downloads/dictum-$version-linux-x64.AppImage ~/Applications/Dictum.AppImage
chmod +x ~/Applications/Dictum.AppImage

Start it again.

Under the same name, start at login keeps working. If you keep each version under its own name instead, turn Start Dictum at login in Settings → General off and on again after the first start of the new file, so that the login item points at it.

To remove:

Turn off Start Dictum at login in Settings → General, if it is on. If you made only the daemon start at login, run this instead:
```
~/Applications/Dictum.AppImage dictum daemon --uninstall-autostart
```
Quit Dictum: Quit Dictum in the tray menu.
Delete the AppImage.
On Wayland, also delete the hidden entry through which the desktop portal recognises Dictum:
```
rm ~/.local/share/applications/dev.dictum.Dictum.desktop
```

Tarball with install.sh¶

To update, unpack the newer tarball and run its install.sh, as for the first install:

version=0.5.1
cd ~/Downloads
tar -xzf dictum-$version-linux-x64.tar.gz
./dictum-$version-linux-x64/install.sh

install.sh asks the running Dictum to quit, then replaces ~/.local/lib/dictum in one step. The login item points into that folder, so it keeps working. Start Dictum again from the application menu.

To remove, run:

~/.local/lib/dictum/uninstall.sh

It quits Dictum and removes:

the programs in ~/.local/lib/dictum;
the links dictum and dictum-gui in ~/.local/bin;
the menu entry and the icons;
the login items and the portal's entry that start this copy of Dictum.

At the end, it prints where your settings and models are, which it keeps.

Arch package¶

To update, build the newer release's package the way you built the first one: put its PKGBUILD and dictum-<version>-linux-x64.tar.gz in one folder and run makepkg -si there. pacman replaces the installed dictum-bin. Then quit Dictum with Quit Dictum in the tray menu and start it again, so that the new version runs.

To remove:

Turn off Start Dictum at login in Settings → General, if it is on. pacman does not touch the files in your home folder, and the login item is one of them.
Quit Dictum: Quit Dictum in the tray menu.
Remove the package:
```
sudo pacman -R dictum-bin
```
On Wayland, also delete ~/.local/share/applications/dev.dictum.Dictum.desktop, the hidden entry through which the desktop portal recognises Dictum.

What removing keeps¶

No uninstaller deletes these, so a reinstall finds your setup as you left it, with no wizard and no download:

What	Windows	Linux
Settings: `config.json` and your prompts	`%APPDATA%\Dictum`	`~/.config/dictum`
Models, history and logs	`%LOCALAPPDATA%\Dictum`	`~/.local/share/dictum`
API keys	Credential Manager	GNOME Keyring or KWallet

Where Dictum keeps its files describes each of them.

Start fresh¶

To set Dictum up again and keep the models, open Settings → General → Setup wizard and click Run setup again. The wizard starts from your current choices.

Or quit Dictum and delete only config.json, whose path dictum config path prints. The next start opens the wizard as on the first run, and models that are already on your computer are not downloaded again.

To delete everything:

Delete the API keys you stored, while the config still names them. Each "apiKey": "secret:<name>" in config.json is one key. List them:
Windows 11Linux
Select-String '"secret:' "$env:APPDATA\Dictum\config.json"
grep '"secret:' ~/.config/dictum/config.json
Then delete each one by the name after secret:, for example as below. On Windows, run dictum by its full path: see The command line.
```
dictum secret delete dictum-processor-llm
```
Quit Dictum: Quit Dictum in the tray menu.
Delete both folders:
Windows 11Linux
Remove-Item -Recurse -Force "$env:APPDATA\Dictum", "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Dictum"
This leaves the programs alone: the installer keeps them in another folder, %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Dictum.
rm -rf ~/.config/dictum ~/.local/share/dictum
Start Dictum. It opens the setup wizard as on the first run, and downloads the speech model again.