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OSC-DreamChatbox

A native Linux and Windows companion for the VRChat chatbox: personal status, now playing, hardware stats, speech to text with translation, a plugin system, and a node canvas for building the message visually.

Everything the app produces ends up in one place — a single OSC message to /chatbox/input, at most 144 characters. Every feature in this wiki is ultimately about deciding what those 144 characters say.

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Contents

Page	What it covers
Apps	Personal Status, Hardware, MediaPlay, Custom Box
Simple Mode	All-in-one: one string, written by hand
Advanced Mode	The node canvas: blocks, wiring, automation
Textbox & Translator	Chat, presets, speech to text, translation
Plugin System	Architecture, writing a plugin, installing
Options	Every setting, with defaults
Placeholder Reference	The full {...} vocabulary

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How the message is assembled

Understanding this order explains most "why does it look like that" questions.

1.  Plugins            lines anchored above a chosen app
2.  Personal Status    one line   (if active)
3.  MediaPlay          1-3 lines  (if active)
4.  Hardware           1-3 lines  (if active)
5.  Custom Box         wrapped around everything
        │
        └──► /chatbox/input        max 144 characters

All in one changes this completely. When it is active, the three apps stop producing lines of their own and become values instead — {artist}, {cpu_temp}, {text} — and you decide the layout yourself, either as a template string (Simple Mode) or as a graph (Advanced Mode).

Where things live

~/.config/OSC-DreamChatbox/
├── config.json          all settings
├── plugins/<id>/        installed plugins
├── backgrounds/         background images for the theme
├── lyrics/              your own .lrc files
└── extras/              SpeechRecognition, installed on demand

On Windows the same folder is under %APPDATA%\OSC-DreamChatbox\.

First steps

1. Options → check the OSC target (127.0.0.1:9000) and switch Send to VRChat on.
2. Apps → switch on what you want to see and watch the preview on the right.
3. Keep an eye on the character counter under the preview. 144 goes faster than it looks.