Hush: I failed to mute Discord while I dictate — then I shipped it

I dictate a lot. Wispr Flow has quietly become the way I write half of everything — messages, commit bodies, notes, the first draft of posts like this one. Hold a key, talk, and clean text appears wherever my cursor is. It's great.

Until you do it on a Discord call.

This is the story of a small tool I built to fix that, how it hit a wall and failed, and how a change of approach a week later turned it into something I actually shipped. Spoiler: the version that works does less than the one that didn't.

The problem: dictating out loud, on an open mic

Here's the scene. I'm pair-programming or in a casual Discord voice channel, and I want to fire off a quick message with Wispr. So I start dictating — out loud, because that's how dictation works — and the entire call hears me narrate my own sentence, punctuation and all. Everyone gets a live feed of "hey can you check the PR comma when you get a sec question mark."

The fix is obvious and annoying: mute Discord, dictate, then unmute. Four actions, every single time, in the right order. Miss one and you either broadcast your dictation or come back from a message muted and wonder why nobody can hear you. I did both, repeatedly.

I wanted one key. Press and hold: Discord goes muted and Wispr starts listening. Release: Wispr stops and Discord comes back. Push-to-talk, but for not talking to the room.

Enter Hush

Hush is a tiny macOS menu-bar app meant to do exactly that. One configurable trigger key wires two other apps together:

• On press → tap Discord's mute shortcut, then start Wispr dictation.
• On release → stop Wispr dictation, then tap Discord's unmute shortcut.

No dock icon, a tray glyph that flips between a safe (muted) and a live (mic open) state, and everything configurable from a little settings window. That was the plan.

My first Electron project

This was my first time actually building with Electron, and honestly? It was a great time. I write React Native all day, so a desktop runtime that's "just" Chromium plus Node felt refreshingly direct: a main process for the tray, IPC and native bits, a plain HTML/CSS/JS window for settings, and a preload bridge in between. I had a menu-bar app running in an afternoon.

The fun part was everything around the browser window — the native OS stuff you don't touch in a mobile framework:

• Listen to the keyboard globally, even when no window is focused, with uiohook-napi.
• Synthesize keystrokes into other apps — Discord's and Wispr's hotkeys — with @nut-tree-fork/nut-js.
• Ask macOS for Accessibility and Input Monitoring permissions, and send the user straight to the right System Settings pane.

The hard bugs — and then the wall

A tool this small has no right to be as tricky as it was. Several problems came from the same root: the app both listens to the keyboard and types on the keyboard. Two of them I actually solved:

• It hears itself. uiohook is a global listener, so it observes the very keystrokes nut-js injects. When Hush synthesized Discord's combo, its own listener saw those keys and flapped mute on and off forever. Fixed with a small SynthGuard that marks the injection window so self-generated events get dropped.
• Held modifiers leak. If your trigger has modifiers, you're physically holding them while Hush injects, so they bleed into every synthetic chord and the target combo never matches. Fixed by synth-releasing the trigger's modifiers first.

And then I hit the wall that ended the project:

Discord accepts a real, physical keypress for its mute hotkey — but it ignores a synthesized one.

Wispr Flow happily reacted to injected keys. Discord did not. Its global-shortcut capture treats an OS-injected key event differently from a real one, so no matter how clean my combo was, the mute never actually fired. The whole premise of Hush — "let a background app press Discord's hotkey for you" — simply isn't something Discord allows. That was the "Discord ne se mute jamais" bug, and it turned out not to be a bug in my code at all. It was the design.

The wall wasn't the end

I almost filed Hush under failed experiment and moved on. Then two things clicked.

One: stop pressing keys at Discord — talk to it directly. Discord runs a local RPC/IPC socket, and it exposes exactly what I need: SET_VOICE_SETTINGS { mute }. No hotkey, no synthesized event, nothing to convince Discord is "real" — a direct call that mutes the mic, and it lands every single time. The thing Discord refused as a fake keypress, it happily does over its own API.

Two — and this is the one that actually mattered: I never needed to synthesize Wispr either. Look at what I'd been doing: I press a trigger, and Hush re-types my Wispr shortcut for me. But I'm already holding a key — so why not make that key simply be my Wispr shortcut? Wispr reacts to my real press natively (it always did). Hush doesn't have to type anything at all. It just needs to notice I'm holding the shortcut and mute Discord alongside it.

That one realization deleted the entire hardest half of the app. The keystroke synthesis (nut-js), the SynthGuard that stopped it hearing itself, the modifier-masking dance — all the machinery behind the two nastiest bugs — gone. What's left is tiny: a global listener notices my push-to-talk shortcut, and Hush mutes Discord over RPC while I hold it. Release, and the mic comes back. One shortcut, zero synthesized keys.

So it shipped

The graveyard label came off. Hush is live and open-source:

• 🔗 matthysdev.github.io/hush — the landing page, with the whole setup walk-through.
• 🍺 brew install --cask matthysdev/hush/hush on macOS, or a one-click installer on Windows.
• 🧑‍💻 Source on GitHub — MIT, ~1,000 lines, still fully unit-tested.

It's a smaller, calmer app than the one I set out to build — and it works precisely because it does less. The failed version fought the OS to inject keys into two apps. The shipped version injects nothing: it mirrors a shortcut I already press and makes one honest API call.

Sometimes a weekend project just gives you a precise map of where the wall is — and sometimes, a week later, you notice there was a door.