# How your text is entered

The four text entry methods, what each one costs you, and which to reach for when text lands badly.

When Blabb has your words, it still has to get them into the window you were working in. There are
four ways to do that, and they behave differently depending on how the app was built. The setting
lives in Settings, **Shortcut & text entry**, under **Text entry**.

## The four methods

| Method | The app's description |
| --- | --- |
| **Direct** | "Places your words straight into the text box. The fastest option for most apps." |
| **Paste** | "Pastes everything at once when you finish speaking. Great for long dictations." |
| **Type fast** | "Types your words quickly. A safe choice for almost any app." |
| **Type slowly** | "Types one letter at a time. The slowest option, but works when nothing else does." |

## Which to try when

**Type fast** is the default, and it is the one to stay on. It types, quickly, the way a keyboard
does, which is what almost every window is expecting. It handles any character, including accented
letters and the curly quotes that come out of Blabb's text cleanup.

**Direct** hands the text to the text box itself rather than typing it, which is quick when it
works. It has a hard limit worth knowing: it only applies to the first insertion into an *empty*
field. Put the cursor in a box that already has text in it and Direct declines, because setting the
value would replace what is already there rather than add to it. That is why it can look like it
works once and then stops.

**Paste** is the one to reach for when you dictate long. It does not wreck your clipboard — Blabb
saves whatever text you had, pastes, and puts your text back. What it cannot save is non-text
clipboard content: if you had an image or copied files on the clipboard, those are gone.

It is also not one single paste. Text is flushed as you speak, roughly every 150 milliseconds, and
each flush is its own paste. So a long dictation is many pastes, not one, and length is not free.

**Type slowly** is not a universal last resort, despite the description. It presses one physical key
per character, and characters that have no key on your current keyboard layout cannot be pressed. If
the text contains anything outside plain ASCII, it refuses before typing a thing and Blabb falls
back to Type fast. For accented or non-Latin text it is strictly worse than Type fast. Reach for it
only when a sluggish or remote window drops characters typed at full speed, and your text is plain
English.

## When a method cannot apply

You do not have to get this right first time. When the method you chose cannot apply — Direct into a
non-empty field, Paste with the clipboard locked, Type slowly given a non-ASCII character — Blabb
falls back to **Type fast** once and types the text there instead. It is one hop, not a chain: if
Type fast is the one failing, there is nowhere further to fall.

> [!TIP]
> Stay on Type fast unless something is wrong. If text lands badly in one app, try Direct, then
> Paste if the dictation is long. Change it for the one app that misbehaves rather than for
> everything — [Per-app settings](/docs/configuration/per-app-settings/) is built for exactly that.

## The one case no method fixes

Windows will not let an unelevated application send input into a window that is running as
administrator. Blabb sends the text, Windows drops it, and nothing at all appears — no error, no
warning, no red dots. It looks identical to Blabb having failed.

If one particular window swallows everything and every other window is fine, check whether that
window was started as administrator. Changing the text entry method will not help, because the
block happens after Blabb has done its part, and the automatic fallback to Type fast is blocked in
exactly the same way.

> [!IMPORTANT]
> This is silent by design in Windows, not a bug in Blabb. It is the single most common reason
> "nothing gets typed" in one app and works everywhere else.

## Remote and virtual desktops

A remote session is a different case again. The window you are looking at is a picture of a machine
somewhere else, and what the remote end accepts varies with how it was configured — clipboard
redirection in particular is often turned off by policy. See
[Remote desktop](/docs/common-issues/remote-desktop/).

## See also

- [Per-app settings](/docs/configuration/per-app-settings/)
- [Nothing gets typed](/docs/common-issues/nothing-gets-typed/)
- [Remote desktop](/docs/common-issues/remote-desktop/)