Optional tools and settings

Reading aloud and AI

Reading aloud

Speak → Read Aloud (F8) reads the document you are in, in a system voice. F9 pauses and resumes, and Stop stops it.

The menu only appears when the feature is switched on: tick *Text to speech* in Preferences. Lekhak uses the voice your system already has — SAPI on Windows, NSSpeech on macOS, espeak on Linux — so there is nothing to install and nothing is downloaded.

It is genuinely useful for prose: hearing a sentence finds the awkward ones faster than the eye does.

AI

AI → Continue Scene asks a model to carry on from where you stopped. AI → Proofread Selection looks at the text you have selected and proposes fixes — typos, grammar, doubled words, stray spaces — as the minimal edit, not a rewrite.

Both are off until you tick AI integration in Preferences and say where the model is:

A local model (Ollama) keeps everything on your machine. Nothing leaves the computer.
A hosted endpoint sends the text you ask about to that service, and nowhere else.

Whatever comes back arrives as tracked changes. You read them and accept or reject them one by one. Lekhak never applies an AI’s words to your manuscript for you, and never quietly rewrites a paragraph because a model suggested it.

The proofreading prompt is deliberately narrow: bloopers, not prose. It is for the mistakes and leaves your voice alone.

AI → Prompt… asks the model anything; the answer comes back as a tracked insertion at the caret.

Set it up in Preferences: Detect local servers finds an Ollama on this machine, Add API… stores a hosted endpoint, and Install Ollama + phi4-mini… puts a small local model in place. AI is off by default — tick AI integration to enable it.

What is sent and not sent

Lekhak does not phone home. There is no account, no telemetry and no upload. I have no idea who you are, what you are using the software for, or even whether you are using it.

The only outbound requests the app can make are the two you ask for: the AI endpoint you configured, and the update check in Preferences — which shows you the exact command to run and writes down what it did.

When you use an AI feature, the request you send includes the text you are working on. If you are concerned about AI services using unpublished work for training or other purposes, choose a service you trust or run a model locally so your requests do not leave your machine.

Settings

Preferences

Edit → Preferences… (Ctrl+,) holds settings that belong to you or to this installation, rather than to a single document. The settings are organised by category.

Appearance
Theme and interface font size. See also Appearance in this section of the guide.

Editor
Spell-check and the dictionary used for your project’s words (including project scan / word-list support where available). If you are unsure about defaults, keep the standard settings.

Files & saving
Autosave, reopening the last project on start, backup location and backup frequency. Backups are extra copies stored outside the project; if you press Ctrl+S often, choose a less frequent automatic schedule to avoid many near-identical backups.

Pasting
Choose which formatting is kept when you paste (fonts and colours, paragraph formatting, bold/italics/underline, alignment). If you are unsure, leave the default paste settings. You can always paste as plain text when needed.

Links
How unpublished links are handled, and whether the Mentions / Mentioned by (Related files) scan is enabled. The mentions scan can be useful in some projects and distracting in others; disable it here if you do not need it.

Placeholders
The project-wide placeholder names and values available to exports and templates, along with the full placeholder reference for the current project.

AI and Read aloud
Optional features. Configure the AI endpoint/model and read-aloud voice/rate here. Enable or disable them according to whether you want those features available in your workflow.

Updates
Auto, Check, Manual or Nothing. Auto and Check look for a new version once per day (the first time Lekhak starts on that date). Manual (default) checks only when you ask, and Nothing makes no network call.

Help
Version and system details (including Copy system details for bug reports), where the program and settings live, links for issues/code/blog, and access to the manual. Copied details do not include your manuscript or project path.

Appearance

Six themes ship: System (desktop), Light, Rose (dusky red), Earth (ochre/olive), Dark (grey sky) and Night rose. System follows your desktop light/dark; the rest are fixed palettes — there is no colour picker, because a theme you can fiddle with is a theme you have to fiddle with.

Pick one in Preferences. The accent colour belongs to the theme, and so do the button faces and the scrollbars: nothing is left in the colour it had before you switched.

Interface font size is also configured in Preferences → Appearance, alongside the theme, so you can adjust the app’s interface text and appearance together.

Spelling

The squiggles come from your system’s dictionary, plus a word list of your own. Words you mark as correct are remembered, per project, in dictionary.txt — a plain file you can read and edit.

Preferences → Project scan scans your project for words Lekhak does not recognise and lets you review them in batches, so names and other project-specific terms can be added quickly.

Keyboard shortcuts

Vidyut

Things I make, grow, write, and figure out.

Optional tools and settings