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Dasher

Dasher v6 Preview Beta: native apps for Windows & Apple

Beta

We’re delighted to open up the Dasher v6 preview beta. For the first time, the completely rewritten v6 engine — one shared DasherCore driving many native frontends — is in your hands across Windows and the Apple platforms. A first-class Linux/GTK build is on its way too.

This is a preview beta. It is real, usable Dasher, but you’ll find rough edges. We want you to break it and tell us — that’s the whole point of opening this up now.

Get the apps

Apple — iOS, macOS & visionOS

The Apple apps (iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision Pro) are distributed through TestFlight:

Windows

The Windows build is built on Avalonia and ships as an MSI installer on GitHub:

Because the installer isn’t yet signed with a Microsoft certificate, Windows will show a security warning. Click “More info” then “Run anyway” (or “Allow”) to proceed. We plan to publish through the Microsoft Store as well as direct download in the future, which will make this step go away.

After installation Dasher won’t open automatically — find it in your Start menu under “Dasher”.

Android

Find the APK here

Linux / GTK

Linux isn’t far behind. The GTK frontend is actively under development and we expect a preview build soon — watch the Dasher-GTK repository for updates.

What’s in this beta

Because every frontend shares a single DasherCore engine, the experience — the zooming interface, the PPM prediction, the colour palettes and switch access — is consistent wherever you run it. But v6 isn’t just about reaching feature parity with v5; some long-requested features and entirely new capabilities are here too.

New and returning features

  • v5 migration tool — bring your existing Dasher settings across automatically, so you don’t start from scratch.
  • On-screen keyboard on iOS — the overlay keyboard that macOS and Windows users have long enjoyed is now available on iPhone and iPad too.
  • Speed mode — the classic high-speed input mode is back, for experienced users who want maximum words per minute.
  • Window transparency — adjustable transparency returns as an option, letting you see through Dasher to what’s behind it.
  • Integrated eye-gaze on Windows — native eye-tracker support built right into the Windows app, something that was never really achievable under v5.
  • Game / training mode with custom text on the Apple apps
  • Control mode (edit text without leaving Dasher) on Windows
  • visionOS, built from the ground up — we’ve put special effort into Apple Vision Pro because we believe Dasher is naturally suited to eye-driven text entry on this kind of device. It’s early days and there’s more work to do, but the potential is genuinely exciting.

Language and prediction

  • More alphabets than ever — we now support even more languages than v5, though not all have full training data yet (alphabets are universal; training data is incremental).
  • Better training data — improved language models thanks to Keith Vertanen’s word-prediction datasets.

Text-to-speech

  • 31 TTS engines, 1,100+ languages, fully offline — using our TTS-wrapper code, Dasher can speak your text in an extraordinary range of voices and languages without needing a network connection.

Analytics

  • Privacy-preserving, opt-in analytics — no text is ever collected. We use aggregate, anonymised data to understand the sheer variety of devices, input methods and configurations we need to support in the future. See RFC 0001.

We need your feedback

This is the most important part. A preview beta is only useful if it reaches the people it’s built for, and if you tell us what works and what doesn’t.

For now, the simplest way is to email me directly: willwade@gmail.com.

We know that’s a blunt instrument, and we’re doing something better. We’re putting together a structured user-testing programme to gather detailed, methodical feedback — the plans for that are being worked through in our governance RFCs, alongside the first-run onboarding work (RFC 0004). Until that lands, please don’t hold back — email with bug reports, feature wishes, and stories of how you’re using Dasher.

A couple of things that are especially helpful:

  • What device and input method are you using? (mouse, trackpad, eye-tracker, switch, hand tracking on Vision Pro…)
  • What’s your use case? Knowing how Dasher fits into your day helps us prioritise.
  • Where does it fall over? Crashes, confusing settings, things that worked in v5 but don’t yet in v6 — all of it.

What’s next

After this preview, our focus is closing the gap to a stable release: finishing the GTK/Linux build, completing socket input for eye-trackers across platforms, and polishing first-run onboarding. You can follow exactly where every feature stands on the live feature status matrix, which is our single source of truth.

Thank you for trying Dasher v6. It exists because of an extraordinary community of contributors, researchers and users built up over more than twenty-five years — and the feedback you send now is how the next twenty-five get started.

— Will

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