Hex Dictation App Shipped Five Releases in Two Days After Its Swift Original Was Archived on October 14

Hex, a free dictation app that transcribes on your machine and pastes the text into whatever window has focus, shipped five releases between October 31 and November 1. Its original Swift repository, kitlangton/Hex, was archived on October 14, and the project now lives at anomalyco/hex.

The move changed what the app is. The old README says Hex "has moved" and that the Swift app "is no longer maintained". The new repository offers builds for macOS on Apple silicon, Windows on x64 and ARM64, and Linux on x86_64 and ARM64, all under the MIT licence.

What 3.0.0 removed

The release page lists Hex 3.0.0 on October 31 as a "fresh-start" release that does not import data from 2.3.1. It removes Voice Action and spoken commands, and the Moonshine model went out with them. It adds a new settings window, a recording indicator and a unified updater.

Anyone who set up spoken commands on an earlier build lost them. The same release gave Linux ARM64 builds, .deb and .rpm packages and a tray icon. Windows installs as a new app rather than upgrading an old one.

Four more releases in a day

November 1 brought 3.1.0, 3.1.1, 3.1.2 and 3.2.0. The page gives each a short list of fixes.

Version	Date	What changed
3.1.0	Nov 1	Windows and Linux x64 need an AVX2 processor from 2013 or newer
3.1.1	Nov 1	Fix for a launch failure from an unreadable settings file
3.1.2	Nov 1	Fix for dictation cut off on quiet microphones
3.2.0	Nov 1	First-run model setup, GPU or CPU engine setting

The AVX2 requirement in 3.1.0 matters for older desktops, since a machine without that instruction set cannot run the x64 builds. Version 3.2.0 also added Hebrew through ivrit.ai's Whisper Large v3 Turbo and a Nemotron 3.5 streaming model.

The README says that after the first run, which downloads a speech model, "nothing leaves your machine". Neither the README nor the site at anoma.ly says which model is the default, how large the download is, or what the app costs, beyond the MIT licence.

How it stacks up against Handy

The closest comparison is cjpais's Handy, a free MIT-licensed offline dictation app with 36.6k stars. Its README names its models: Whisper in Small, Medium, Turbo and Large sizes, and Parakeet V3 for CPU-only machines.

Handy also lists its faults. Pasting can sometimes insert the previous clipboard contents instead of the transcript, tracked as issue #502, and some Linux setups crash at startup. Hex's pages list no such known issues.

1. Handy37K stars
2. anomalyco/hex3300 stars
3. kitlangton/Hex (archived)2900 stars

Source: GitHub repository pages, accessed 2026-11-02 (Hex figures approximate as displayed)

The stars do not say how many people use either tool, and they split Hex's audience across two repositories.

Contributions are closed

The project accepts no pull requests. Users are asked to open an issue instead, and the repository's text says the maintainers' agents "usually turn it around fast". It does not say who the maintainers are beyond the Anomaly organisation.

That is a different model from other small tools we have covered, such as the AGPL-licensed OmniDiff and kube32, whose authors invite outside code. With 3.2.0 on November 1 as the latest tag, the next signal is whether releases keep arriving at five a day or settle.