v2.40.0 — the tool that said yes and did nothing¶

Released 2026-09-24. Upgrade:

sudo snap refresh yazses     # snap
pipx upgrade yazses          # or: uv tool upgrade yazses
scoop update yazses          # Windows

If you are on Debian or Ubuntu, this release is the one that matters¶

Since v2.39.0, dictation on Debian and Ubuntu Wayland was transcribed correctly and then typed nothing. The daemon log said Injecting 21 chars, 2 words. and the screen stayed empty. yazses doctor said [OK] Injection: ydotool and ▲ Good to go.

ydotool 1.x and ydotool 0.1.x are different command-line tools wearing the same name. Debian and Ubuntu ship 0.1.8 — that is the version in Ubuntu 24.04 through 26.04. YazSes spoke only 1.x:

$ ydotool type -d 6 -H 6 -- hello
ydotool: type: error: unrecognised option '-d'
$ echo $?
0

That exit code is why this was silent rather than merely broken. check=True never raised, so the clipboard fallback never fired, nothing reached the log, and doctor had nothing to report.

Why v2.39.0 was where it started¶

v2.39.0 fixed socket discovery: ydotoold 0.1.8 ignores --socket-path and binds /tmp/.ydotool_socket, so YazSes learned to look there. That fix is correct in itself. But it made ydotool selectable on Debian and Ubuntu for the first time, and ydotool is first in the backend order — so it displaced a path that had been working.

A fix that makes a backend reachable makes it load-bearing. The probe was right and the backend behind it had never been exercised on those machines.

Three command lines, all wrong, all silent¶

What YazSes sent	What ydotool 0.1.x did
`type -d 6 -H 6`	refused it; 0.1.x spells it `--key-delay` and has no hold time
`key 29:1 47:1 …`	0.1.x wants symbolic names, and has no error path at all
`key 97:0`	typed the digit `9` — on every hold-end

That last one is the stuck-modifier guard, which runs after every burst. And because 0.1.x's key falls back to the first character of a name it does not recognise, Return — what "new line" sends — typed the letter r, Escape typed e, and KEY_BACKSPACE typed k.

What changed¶

YazSes now detects which ydotool is installed and speaks its dialect. It classifies ydotool's stderr rather than believing its exit code, so a refused command line reaches the clipboard fallback instead of vanishing. A key that 0.1.x cannot express raises rather than typing a wrong character. Falling back to the clipboard is logged at WARNING, because this whole failure was invisible. And yazses doctor now names the dialect it found:

[OK] Injection: ydotool 0.1.x — works on any Wayland compositor (Debian/Ubuntu's
     older CLI: typed with --key-delay and symbolic key names; the key-up flood
     guard 1.x offers is not expressible here)

If you are on ydotool 1.x — Arch, Fedora, or a source build — nothing changes: the command lines YazSes sends you are byte-for-byte what they were, and a test now pins them against the help text upstream v1.0.4 actually prints.

Also in this release¶

Windows can paste instead of typing. [injection] backend = "clipboard" now works on Windows, for applications that receive the right number of characters with every one of them wrong — rows of ?, - or .. Off by default.
[injection] backend was ignored on Windows. The setting was read, validated and then overridden. The one platform where the alternative is the documented remedy was the one platform that could not choose it.
yazses inject --delay and --diagnose, so you can test injection into the application you actually care about rather than into the terminal you typed in.
A face you hold instead of a key you press — opt-in, off by default.
A contributor's one-line cask fix that could only ever have been reverted.