You can dictate in any Mac terminal: click in the window, start Apple Dictation or a push-to-talk dictation app, and speak. Warp is the only one of the four big Mac terminals with its own voice input: hold Fn, speak, release. In Terminal, iTerm2 and Ghostty you use Apple Dictation or a separate app. Dictate prompts for a coding agent, not raw shell commands, because a shell runs whatever reaches it when Return is pressed.
Publisher note: SuprFlow publishes this guide and is one of the products discussed. Competitor details come from each company's own pages, checked on 1 October 2026. Prices and features change; confirm before you buy.
Which Mac terminals have their own voice input?
| Terminal | Built-in voice input | Multi-line paste safeguard in its docs |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal (Apple) | None described | None described in Apple's Terminal guide |
| iTerm2 | None described | Warn Before Multi-Line Paste |
| Warp | Yes: hold Fn, or click the microphone in Agent Mode | Input editor with IDE-style multi-line editing |
| Ghostty | None described | clipboard-paste-protection |
Warp
Warp's voice input page says you can click the microphone icon in Agent Mode, or on macOS "press and hold the Fn key (configurable) to start recording" and release it to transcribe. Settings live in Settings → Agents → Warp Agent → Voice. Warp says voice works "across all of Warp's input interfaces", including the command input and the Find dialog.
On processing, Warp says: "The transcription is powered by Wispr Flow. Voice data is processed in real-time by Wispr Flow and is not retained as a recording after transcription." It also mentions anti-abuse usage limits and that on an Enterprise plan your administrator may have disabled Voice. Its troubleshooting section recommends you "review the transcription before sending", and asks you to enunciate file names and commands clearly.
If you also use another app that listens for Fn, such as SuprFlow, change one of the two hotkeys so they do not both fire.
Terminal, iTerm2 and Ghostty
Their documentation does not describe built-in voice input as of 1 October 2026: see Apple's Terminal User Guide, iTerm2's menu items documentation and Ghostty's configuration reference. Use one of the routes below.
How do you use Apple Dictation in a terminal?
Apple's Dictation guide for macOS 27 says you can "speak to enter text anywhere you can type it".
- Turn Dictation on in System Settings → Keyboard → Dictation. On another macOS version, search System Settings for "Dictation".
- Click in the terminal window, at the prompt you want to fill.
- Press the Microphone key or your Dictation shortcut, speak, and stop.
- Read the line before you press Return.
Apple says Dictation stops after 30 seconds without speech. Keyboard settings show whether your Dictation is processed on the device. Setup is in how to use voice to text on a Mac; keys are in the Mac dictation shortcut guide.
Do not say "new line" or "new paragraph" at a shell prompt. Apple says "new line" is "equivalent to pressing the Return key once", and at a shell, Return runs the line.
What happens when a dictation app pastes into a terminal?
SuprFlow is one example of a system-wide push-to-talk app. It is a menu-bar app for Apple Silicon Macs on macOS 14 or later. Hold the Fn key, speak, release, and it pastes the text at the cursor in the focused field. Speech recognition runs on the Mac after a one-time model download; see https://suprflow.app/requirements. Default formatting is local cleanup of punctuation, capitalization and numbers. It costs $125 once (as of 1 October 2026), with no free tier or trial. It should work wherever you can paste text; test it in each terminal with a harmless prompt.
A paste in a terminal goes to whatever owns the prompt line: your shell, or an agent such as Claude Code or Codex running in it. What each terminal documents about multi-line pastes:
- iTerm2. Edit → Paste Special → Warn Before Multi-Line Paste: "When enabled, you'll be warned before pasting more than one line." A second option, Warn Before Pasting One Line Ending in a Newline at Shell Prompt, asks for confirmation and "requires shell integration to be installed to work."
- Ghostty.
clipboard-paste-protectionwill "require confirmation before pasting text that appears unsafe", to stop you executing commands "by pasting text with newlines." By default, bracketed pastes "are considered safe": that is, when the running program has turned on bracketed paste mode, Ghostty does not ask (clipboard-paste-bracketed-safe). - Warp. Its input editor docs say it "operates out of the box like a modern IDE", with multi-line editing; Shift-Enter inserts a newline. The docs do not spell out what a pasted multi-line block does, so test it.
- Terminal. Apple's guide lists Paste (Command-V) and Paste Escaped Text (Control-Command-V), and describes no multi-line warning. SuprFlow's recovery picker also uses Control-Command-V, so check which one responds on your Mac.
Inside an agent, the agent decides what a pasted newline means; test with a two-line harmless prompt.
What is dictation good and bad at in a terminal?
Good: prompts to Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and other agents; describing an error; commit messages written in an editor the terminal opens.
Bad: shell commands. "Git push dash dash force" is not git push --force, and a wrong word in a command is dangerous. Paths, flags, pipes, quotes and brackets need typing or careful review. Recurring names can go in a personal dictionary; see teaching SuprFlow names and acronyms.
What should you check before pressing Return?
- Is this an agent prompt or a bare shell? If the agent has exited, you are at the shell.
- Are paths, flags and branch names exact?
- Did "don't" or "without" survive?
- Anything destructive (
rm, force-push, migrations, production) was typed, not spoken. - No secret, token or password was spoken. Terminal history may keep what you send.
- A multi-line paste warning, if one appears, is a prompt to read, not to dismiss.
Where does your speech go?
| Route | Audio |
|---|---|
| Warp voice input | Wispr Flow, per Warp's docs |
| Apple Dictation | Check Keyboard settings, as Apple says |
| SuprFlow | Recognised on the Mac |
A prompt about your code can contain proprietary details. Wherever the audio goes, the text goes to your agent's provider when you send it.
Questions people ask
Can I use voice to text in the Mac Terminal app?
Yes, with Apple Dictation or a dictation app. Apple's Terminal guide describes no built-in voice input.
Does Warp have speech to text?
Yes. Hold Fn on a Mac, or click the microphone in Agent Mode. Warp says transcription is powered by Wispr Flow.
Will dictated text run as a command by itself?
Not unless a Return reaches the shell. Read the line first, and turn on iTerm2's or Ghostty's paste warnings if you use paste-based dictation.
Does dictation work over SSH in a terminal?
Apple Dictation and paste-based apps type into the local terminal window, so the text reaches whatever that window is connected to. Test with a harmless line.
Related guides
- Vibe coding by voice on a Mac
- Dictate to Claude Code and Cursor
- Voice dictation for Codex CLI
- Dictate to Gemini CLI and OpenCode
- SuprFlow not pasting into apps