di·a·lect /ˈdaɪ.ə.lɛkt/ noun
A lisp-based computation toolbox for your wrist that works without your phone nearby.
Dialect lets you write, manage and run Scheme scripts on your Apple Watch using LispKit. It's a standalone environment, meaning that everything—editing, evaluation, file management and more—happens on your watch.
Dialect is very firm on its stance of being standalone first, with the companion app helpful but never required for computation, writing scripts, or any other action. OUr main design goals are:
- Standalone First: Dialect should work fully without a phone. While the optional iOS companion app helps with file transfer, organization and configuration, the watch app must never depend on it being installed or nearby.
- Wrist-First Authoring: Writing, editing, and running code on the wrist is the entire point of the app, rather than a fallback for when your phone is not near. Scheme makes this tractable in a way that traditional languages cannot: code is made up of s-expressions, which let Dialect offer structural editing where you navigate and build programs by selecting and inserting expressions rather than typing characters. The Digital Crown is used to move through the syntax tree, and you should rarely need to type a parenthesis. Heck, you should rarely need to type at all.
- Computation that Survives the Wrist: Apple Watch apps are suspended almost the moment you lower your arm. Dialect plans to snapshot the whole virtual machine, so a long-running computation can be resumed exactly where it stopped rather than abandoned on wrist-down.
- Not a Toy: Sessions are editable notebooks of top-level forms with their results, saved alongside their live VM state. We plan to include a full file manager with media viewing, scope-aware editing tools, and libraries for filesystem access, web protocols, mathematics, graphics, and more.
Extremely early in development. We have successfully proven that the LispKit bytecode VM can be compiled (with some tweaks) to run on watchOS, and have done design work for what a wrist-based editing workflow looks like, but we're only at the very start of the application's development.
- LispKit by Matthias Zenger: a comprehensive R7RS Scheme implementation in Swift, used via a fork that adds watchOS support. LispKit is licensed under Apache 2.0, and Dialect bundles a number of third-party Scheme libraries; full attribution will ship in the app.
Copyright 2026 Ara Adkins, licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
Dialect builds on LispKit and bundles third-party Scheme libraries under their own permissive licences; the complete attribution set ships inside the app.