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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

#151

Post by rabbitofdeath »

karencarits wrote: post #90
UtopiaPunk wrote: post #74

I use a tool called "Espanso" to accomplish something similar at work. It only runs locally, so no weird data scraping issues to worry about. And it's easy to update as things changes because everything lives in a simple yml file. https://espanso.org/ It can do simple text replacement, so I have words, phrases, and sentences I use frequently compressed into a few keyboard clicks. It can also grab what is in your clip…

A sidenote, but Espanso can also be set up to communicate with eg chatgpt; you copy some text and type a trigger word such as ":ask" or ":debug" and it makes a request from the trigger and the clipboard and returns the reply from openai https://github.com/rohitna/chatgpt-script

WOW! I use Espanso and love it - this will send me off into new rabbitholes!

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#152

Post by porridgeraisin »

I prefer an autocomplete mobile like experience for most typing. I use autohotkey to have global autocomplete for English, anywhere in any app i type it gives me options in a little tabbable box immediately. I disable it for vscode usually except when I'm typing markdown I manually enable it. I love it.

Beyond this I use ahk's hotstrings feature to have "snippets". I separate them by topic and activate them as and when they're required. For example I have one for css which has things like

  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
  align-items: center;
bound to a single hotstring.

I know I can use vscode snippets but I prefer this.

I also have global hotstrings for say my emails, address, etc,. Unencrypted in my home directory. I don't care too much but you might.

The coolest one is a password manager that lets you use your username/email on any website as the password.

You just press a hotkey and are prompted to enter the secure master password. Once you do that, it decrypts your passwords and activates the hotstrings required to convert usernames to their respective passwords. When you press enter and submit the form it kills it. This is only one of the variations I have. The previous one had me enter the master password in the form itself, and it'll read the context of the browser itself get the URL from there and automatically replace the correct password. I stopped using this as it became unwieldy once I had to have multiple Gmail accounts for example.

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#154

Post by satyajitrai »

manx wrote: post #47

Very interesting. I once recorded all my vim keypresses to do something similar for vim, but never actually did anything with the data. Seems like it should be easily doable with this project now.

Vim has a feature called "abbreviations" that can be used to expand abbreviations as well as correct common typos. Here's an article about it - https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/vim-abbreviations

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#155

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

Exuma wrote: post #150
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This perspective makes total sense if you never have to write code that is maintained by someone else or deal with code that some else has written.

All of our abstractions make sense to us. We wouldn’t have written them otherwise. But unless we are gods at documentation passing that context off to someone else is hard. It’s very easy to casually dismiss a bunch of code as over engineered by also casually dismissing requirements. By being extremely diligent about what you introduce in terms of code you will save yourself and other engineers hundred of hours down the line (if not thousands)

That being said, if you’re a startup who won’t survive without working code and your end users don’t ever see the code you write, who the fuck cares about the 10,000 lines of code you write that would take some other engineer half a month to understand? 10,000 lines of code that make money are worth infinitely more than 10 elegant ones that don’t

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#156

Post by Exuma »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #155
Exuma wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This perspective makes total sense if you never have to write code that is maintained by someone else or deal with code that some else has written. All of our abstractions make sense to us. We wouldn’t have written them otherwise. But unless we are gods at documentation passing that context off to someone else is hard. It’s very easy to casually dismiss a bunch of code as over engineered by also casually dismissing r…

That makes complete sense. The team aspect is probably where our experiences differ the most.

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#159

Post by monooso »

The author is clearly using this for prose (as opposed to code), and I wonder how it compares to dictation in terms of speed.

I've never really tried using text to speech for writing blog posts and the like, but I know David Sparks (MacSparky) swears by it; and he produces a lot more written content than I do.

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#160

Post by TehShrike »

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

I agree. Code is a liability, and you should think as hard as possible so that you can write the smallest amount to produce value.

But at the end of the day, you are often going to be writing something, and once you figure out what that is, it should transmit from your brain to the editor as fast as possible.

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