Command Line Reference#

This page describes all the options available to run Plover from the command line. The command is available under slightly different names on each platform, relative to your installation directory:

  • Windows: C:\Program Files (x86)\Open Steno Project\Plover 4.0.0\plover_console.exe

  • macOS: /Applications/Plover.app/Contents/MacOS/Plover

  • Linux: plover.AppImage

All of the above commands will be referred to as plover below.

--help#

Display the help text and then exit.

--version#

Display the running Plover version and then exit.

-g <gui>#

Specify the GUI system to use. The options are as follows:

qt

Run the built-in Qt-based GUI. This is the default value.

none

Run Plover headless, i.e. without a GUI. You’ll only be able to control Plover from the command line or with steno commands.

-l <level>, --log-level <level>#

Change the minimum level of logs being shown on standard output. Options are debug, info, warning, and error. By default, no logs are displayed.

-s <script>, --script <script>#

Use another console script as the main entrypoint. This passes the remainder of the command line arguments to the console script. For example, to run the plugin installer:

plover -s plover_plugins

Pass -s without an argument to show the list of console scripts.

Plugin Installer#

The plugin installer can be accessed through the plover_plugins console script:

plover -s plover_plugins

This is essentially a wrapper around pip; you can run commands to install and remove packages just like on a normal Python installation. For example, to install and uninstall the plover-treal plugin:

plover -s plover_plugins install plover-treal
plover -s plover_plugins uninstall plover-treal

To list all of the plugins available on your system:

plover -s plover_plugins list

To install a plugin you are working on locally:

cd plover_myplugin
plover -s plover_plugins install -e .

Note

Some users have had issues loading the plugin list with the Plugin Manager; this seems to have something to do with an outdated version of another package. This can be fixed with the following command:

plover -s plover_plugins install --disable-pip-version-check --upgrade Pygments

Sending Commands#

The plover_send_command console script can be used to send commands to an existing Plover instance:

plover -s plover_send_command

It takes the command name and parameters as an argument, written as they would be in a dictionary definition. For example, to send the command {plover:toggle}, you can invoke this script as follows:

plover -s plover_send_command toggle