Please choose a version of Dasher from the table below. You may also find the training texts below helpful.
Dasher (versions 3 and above) is available for general use under the conditions of the GNU General Public Licence. You should be aware of the terms and conditions of this licence, which is also contained in the distribution itself.
There is also fork of Dasher that has been relicensed under an MIT licence - see https://github.com/dasher-project/dasher-MITTraining texts are also provided. All versions of Dasher include an English training text. The Windows and macOS packages include many other training texts. If necessary, you can download individual languages' training texts from here too.
If you want to keep in touch with Dasher developments after downloading, please see this page for mailing list information.
The update of Dasher to version 5 was developed by Ada Majorek, who sadly passed away in June 2017.
Download from github
The mac version 5 has been updated, September 2024, to work on recent versions of macOS and bring it up to feature parity with v4 for mac, thanks to sponsorship from Jorge Tendeiro and Herbosophy.
v5 is recommended for all recent macOS versions, and has been tested on 10.14 (Mojave) and macOS 14 (Sonoma).
Download v5.14 here.
If you get the error 'Dasher.app can't be opened because it is from an unidentified developer' or '"Dasher" can't be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software', locate the Dasher app in Finder, ctrl-click, and chose Open. This only needs to be done the first time you run Dasher.
Please check the README inside the zip file (or here) for further details. It has important tips, especially for using Direct Mode to enter text directly into other applications.
The original source code repository is maintained as part of the GNOME project on gitlab, with a read-only mirror on github.
The ACE Centre has an MIT-licensed fork of Dasher.
32 bit Windows XP version is confirmed to work under 64 bit Windows 7. Please manually uninstall any versions prior to 4.4.2 before installing version 4.6.0.
For speech production, the Microsoft Speech API is required. This is included in Windows XP or may be obtained from http://www.microsoft.com/speech/download/sdk51/
4.11 This will not work on recent versions of MacOS. Please try version 5, above.
expat 2.0.1 necessary for MacOS X less than 10.5
If you have any problems with downloading, please let us know. You can browse the download folders directly here