Installation Guide

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Install Plover on Windows

Plover can be installed or ran as a portable ZIP. It may be useful to use the portable ZIP if you are running Plover off of a USB stick or the if the host machine has restricted permissions. For all other use cases, however, the installer method is recommended.

Download the Windows installer here

Run the installer and follow the onscreen instructions. You may need to grant permissions for the app to bypass Windows Defender SmartScreen.

Download the Windows portable ZIP here

Extract the entire folder to the location that you’d like to run Plover from. Inside the folder, run plover.exe to start Plover.

Install Plover on Mac

Download Plover for Mac here

Open the .dmg file.
In the mounted disk, drag the Plover.app to your Applications folder.
Open the Applications folder.
Control-click on Plover, then choose Open from the shortcut menu.
Open System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility.
Click the + Button, and go to your applications and select Plover.app.

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Make sure to follow step 4 when starting Plover for the first time. Double clicking the app will not work if it is your first time opening Plover (see here for more info).

Plover is set up! You can run Plover like you would any other application.

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Other “keyboard helper”-type applications (e.g. Karabiner Elements and text expanders) may interfere with Plover.

If you had previously uninstalled Plover or upgraded your system

Repeat step 5, and remove Plover from the list. Do not just uncheck Plover; you will have to explicitly remove Plover by using the - button. Once Plover has been removed, re-add Plover.app by repeating step 6.

Install Plover on Linux

Plover is provided as an AppImage. This is the only officially supported method to using Plover on Linux.

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Plover is not officially supported on systems running Wayland at this moment. Many distros use Wayland by default and you will need to switch to X11 in order to use Plover. Follow a tutorial like this one to determine if you’re running Wayland and how to switch.

Download the Plover AppImage here

To use it:

Download it
Make it executable
Launch it like a standard executable

Allow Access to Serial Ports

All hobbyist steno keyboards use serial protocols to communicate with Plover. Users by default do not have privileges to use these protocols. You will have to add your user to a group in order to obtain those privileges.

To find the name of the relevant group, plug in your steno keyboard and open a terminal to run the following command:

stat -c "%G" /dev/ttyACM*

You should see dialout or uucp depending on your distro. If the above command results in a “file not found” error, try replacing ACM with USB and verify that your keyboard is connected with a working cable.

Once you know the correct group, add your user to it by running the following command:

sudo usermod -aG <group> $USER

Replace <group> with the output of the previous command.

Once you have added yourself to the right group, restart your computer.

Error relating to xcb

You may run into the following error when trying to run Plover:

Could not load the Qt platform plugin “xcb” in “” even though it was found. This application failed to start because noQt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Ensure that the following packages are installed:

libxcb
xcb-util
qt5-qtstyleplugins
libxcb-cursor0

Note that the names of these packages may differ depending on the distro you are using. If the error still persists, run the following:

./plover-4.0.0rc2-x86_64.AppImage -s plover_plugins install -v 'PyQt5==5.14.2' 'PyQt5-sip==12.7.2'

Setting up my machine

Initially, Plover is set up to use your computer keyboard as a steno machine. If you have a steno machine, you’ll need to configure Plover to look for your machine. Please check the Supported Hardware page to find instructions specific to your machine.

Other installation methods

Other releases

You can browse various other releases of Plover by scrolling through the releases page. To download a release, click on “Assets” and download the applicable file for your operating system.

downloading other versions gif — Scroll down and click "Assets" in order to find the download links. You don't have to download every file; only the one that is applicable to your operating system.

Homebrew Cask

If you have Homebrew Cask installed on your system, you can run brew install --cask plover at the command-line.

Arch AUR package

Two AUR packages are provided:

plover for the latest stable release
and plover-git for the current master

Note: the plugins manager is not part of plover-git, and is available as a separate package.

Gentoo git ebuild

Currently, only a git ebuild for the master branch is provided.

Personal overlay. (out of date dependencies)

Void Linux package

Plover is packaged in the Void Linux repositories under the package name plover.

Note: the plugins manager has not been packaged yet.

Troubleshooting

If you get stuck, you can:

Check the troubleshooting guide.
Search for your problem in our issue tracker and our Discussions forum.
If you can’t find your particular problem, open a support request or start a Discussion.

We also have a Plover Discord Server, the steno community, and a GitHub Discussions forum if you have a general idea or discussion topic.

For developers: running from source

If you want to build from source (e.g. if you are a developer), follow the guide for your operating system: