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Show HN: I automated half of my typing

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Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#141

Post by wryanzimmerman »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #133
Exuma wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing fast is one of the greatest strengths for programming for me personally, especially when compared with Vim. It's that that it's a limiting factor, but rather I max out typing quite often, and also I have always wanted to hit 200 just for fun, but it currently feels not attainable. Some people say they spend more time than they do typing, but I definitely don't find that to be the case very often.

I am a bit jealous (maybe?) that typing speed is a factor for you. I am the kind of person that will think for minutes at a time before writing a single line of code

All depends on what you’re doing… sometimes people have to write, like, css.

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#142

Post by LanternLight83 »

eschluntz wrote: post #3

Also the most surprising part of doing this was seeing that abbreviating super short words like "the" -> "t" actually saves far more characters overall than abbreviating long words and phrases that are less common, like "what do you think" -> "wdytk".

I think you'd dig Ikcelaks Magic Sturdy layout, which has a dedicated Adaptive Key (ie. morphing based on your last keypress, while fitting in with the overall layout by keeping finger usage and comfortable motions in mind). I mention it here because it expands to "the" if your last "letter" was space.

https://github.com/Ikcelaks/keyboard_layouts/blob/main/magic...

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#143

Post by fsckboy »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #45

I feel like typing is never really the bottleneck for me except maybe in some chat interactions would have benefited from the extra bandwidth of video or audio. Do you actually save time on task with these kinds of shortcuts?

i wonder if touch typing figures in?

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#144

Post by fsckboy »

mtlynch wrote: post #6

This is neat! I've thought about doing something similar with my shell history to help me figure out which shell aliases I should create.

>figure out which shell aliases

I use shell functions for this type stuff, and I have it spit out the command line it's going to run with all the args (to stderr) and then running the command, and other sorts of programmatic touchup (tell me if i'm in the wrong directory, or whatever)

spitting out the command line it's going to run with all the args (to stderr) is a function too. shell functions can also do nice things like change the directory in my outside shell, set environment variables, etc.

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#145

Post by Exuma »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #133
Exuma wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing fast is one of the greatest strengths for programming for me personally, especially when compared with Vim. It's that that it's a limiting factor, but rather I max out typing quite often, and also I have always wanted to hit 200 just for fun, but it currently feels not attainable. Some people say they spend more time than they do typing, but I definitely don't find that to be the case very often.

I am a bit jealous (maybe?) that typing speed is a factor for you. I am the kind of person that will think for minutes at a time before writing a single line of code

It's definitely situation dependent. When writing a lot of frontend code (vue, typescript, css, tailwind, html) I know what I'm typing several mental steps before I actually type it, so speed gains there are most pronounced.

Sitting somewhere in the middle are dynamic languages where there might be certain implementations (say... some random api integration) where it's simply a lot of code I've typed thousands of times before. This still benefits from fast typing, especially when needing to operate surgically with vim, it's one of the moments I love the most (basically getting 20x combos with perfect typing at high speed when moving/modifying/transforming blocks of text etc etc)

What benefits least of the 3 is writing things like Golang where it still definitely helps typing fast, don't get me wrong, but I usually have to think more there. Pace is slower, and symbols can become a pain in the ass.

At the end of the day... you're still typing thousands of lines of code regardless of whether you're thinking or not. I never understood the argument "I spend more time thinking than coding". You are still going to write the same amount of code whether you're thinking or not. My ideal world (why I love typing fast) is that that time of me coding gets brought down by 50-200% over someone who types slow. I use that time for accelerating ahead. Ie... prototyping and deleting tons of code before refining/cementing in a design is painless.

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#146

Post by fsckboy »

jorvi wrote: post #125
crazygringo wrote: post #42

This is a very clever idea. However, I realize that I would never want to use something like this that would change over time. E.g. if I ran it every 6 months and last year "db" produced "debug", while this year it produces "database". Because talk about messing up my muscle memory and habits. And the language I write changes very much over time. So I'd actually be much more interested in a "universal" version of thi…

> E.g. expanding "t" to "the" seems like a no-brainer, just like "st" to "something". Is there a minimal set of, say, 200-500 of these that could simply be turned into a "standard keyboard" that everyone could learn? Is it a "no-brainer"? I would map "st" to "start".

looks like we have a choice, to see the Cardinals game, would you rather go to Something Louis or Start Louis? Or we could wait till they play the Twins and visit Start Paul at the same time.

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#147

Post by dr_kiszonka »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #109

I have spent a good deal of time trying to create text expansions for myself. (manually) It is a lot harder than I thought it would be. To find aliases that dont misfire too often and provide enough value. Give that I daily communicate in several languages that adds even more trouble. I have now split it by application. Different aliases for different applications. I still have misfires. Mostly I have found I need de…

I prefix my aliases with letter combinations that are unlikely to appear as first letters of words and variable names like kk, zz, qq. For example, qqme is my email signature.

I wish OP's tool suggested aliases for longer phrases than what I saw in the readme. I heard TextExpander for MacOs does that but I am not a Mac user.

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#149

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

Exuma wrote: post #145
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a bit jealous (maybe?) that typing speed is a factor for you. I am the kind of person that will think for minutes at a time before writing a single line of code

It's definitely situation dependent. When writing a lot of frontend code (vue, typescript, css, tailwind, html) I know what I'm typing several mental steps before I actually type it, so speed gains there are most pronounced. Sitting somewhere in the middle are dynamic languages where there might be certain implementations (say... some random api integration) where it's simply a lot of code I've typed thousands of tim…

for me philosophically code is a liability. Every line of code I write is a liability for me and future generations. So I try as hard as I can to not write code at all so it takes me quite a long time to decide to write code. I see it like that in the places I work too, I get paid to decide when it makes sense to write code eg introduce liability to the business

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#150

Post by Exuma »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #149
Exuma wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely situation dependent. When writing a lot of frontend code (vue, typescript, css, tailwind, html) I know what I'm typing several mental steps before I actually type it, so speed gains there are most pronounced. Sitting somewhere in the middle are dynamic languages where there might be certain implementations (say... some random api integration) where it's simply a lot of code I've typed thousands of tim…

for me philosophically code is a liability. Every line of code I write is a liability for me and future generations. So I try as hard as I can to not write code at all so it takes me quite a long time to decide to write code. I see it like that in the places I work too, I get paid to decide when it makes sense to write code eg introduce liability to the business

Interesting perspective. I am a solo developer for all my own companies, and I basically work alone managing a number of high volume businesses. I look at code as "art" oddly enough, and not a liability. I look for elegant solutions that wrap complexity up in the most elegant way possible, and I think a lot of "liability" comes from people not knowing what they want, and not refining features, as opposed to code (at least in the business I work on, it sounds different for you in your case)

Edit: Not that "high volume" means anything but I put that there to illustrate there's millions of dollars of liability on the line, not just pet projects or something. It just sounds like a different kind of business I'd guess. Working on a team is definitely something a lot different, that I don't really deal with, nor have much experience with.

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