Show HN: I automated half of my typing • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#201

Post by eschluntz » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 4:57 AM UTC

Brajeshwar wrote: post #182

First, I have to make a personal confession — I never liked the SMS short-hand thingy that worked with pre-iPhone phones. That was one of the reason I seldom use SMS/Text-Messages unless I really need to. I have been using text-expansion since the early days of TextExpander[1], an app that works on iOS and macOS. However good the iPhone keyboard was, it was always not convenient to type and retype details such as hom…

yeah, I spent a decent amount of time getting delimiter correct in the Autokey configs that I generate. Fanciest thing I do is special case ".py" :)

In general "." is a delimiter, EXCEPT for "py" so that it doesn't interfere with me typing python files

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#202

Post by eschluntz » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 5:00 AM UTC

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…

ooh yeah, with multiple languages I bet there are WAY fewer available shortcuts. one of my TODOs is to use the actual corpus of text I analyze to also generate the "blacklist" of aliases to avoid

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#203

Post by eschluntz » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 5:01 AM UTC

Sparkyte wrote: post #199

1000 mph into a concrete barrier scenario, but I like the enthusiasm behind it. I would imagine some words with nearly the same spelling have potentially collided with automation causing some hilarious feedback. English is a pretty annoying language.

I started small and just memorized the first 10, etc, but I definitely had the intention of going all in from the beginning

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#204

Post by eschluntz » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 5:04 AM UTC

passion__desire wrote: post #94

eschluntz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main motivation was very fast slack conversations (Can you post a screenshot?) and a bunch of email responses that are pretty formulaic (sending my calendly link, etc). For longer writing I'm often frustrated that I can think faster than I can type, so it does help with that too!

For longer writing, why not write anchor words on the scratch notes and then flesh out details? Or do you think, that in the flow of ideas, all sentence details need to be jotted down too? Because you feel they come out perfect the first time?

I certainly write outlines first, but when I do sit down to write a full draft I really like to get to something that's "complete" even if it's really bad. Then I can switch into "editing" mode mentally.

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#205

Post by eschluntz » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 5:05 AM UTC

botanical wrote: post #188

This is great. Is it possible to somehow use it with keyd, as I don't use autohotkey? https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd/

Yeah! I'm going to need to migrate away from autokey soon because it doesn't support Wayland. I'll probably create a few different scripts for generating one list of shortcuts into several possible different utilities

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#206

Post by eschluntz » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 5:08 AM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #69

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".

It would be interesting to see how much time you save. I guess average typists will type "the" much faster than a complex word. Through muscle memory. I think it will be less noticeable for fast typists, who get their speed by being consistently fast.

I thought a bit about this... I feel like for me most of my slowdown comes from needing to get timing correct between my right and left hand. When I go too fast I start to get the letters in the wrong order, which isn't as much of a risk for letters all coming from the same hand (for me at least shrug)

I might go look for some research on typing times for different kinds of words beyond letter count!

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#207

Post by eschluntz » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 5:10 AM UTC

monooso wrote: post #159

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.

my main use case was quick slack messages and emails. I haven't found any good dictation systems where the latency of starting / stopping it for really quick messages wasn't too high a barrier.

For longer form writing I have used dictation and I really liked it!

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#208

Post by eschluntz » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 5:11 AM UTC

cfeduke wrote: post #158

After reading this I determined I don't talk about the robot nearly as much as I should or could be.

haha, when you start a robotics company you end up spending a LOT of time talking about robots...

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#209

Post by Brajeshwar » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 5:20 AM UTC

eschluntz wrote: post #201

Brajeshwar wrote: post #182

First, I have to make a personal confession — I never liked the SMS short-hand thingy that worked with pre-iPhone phones. That was one of the reason I seldom use SMS/Text-Messages unless I really need to. I have been using text-expansion since the early days of TextExpander[1], an app that works on iOS and macOS. However good the iPhone keyboard was, it was always not convenient to type and retype details such as hom…

yeah, I spent a decent amount of time getting delimiter correct in the Autokey configs that I generate. Fanciest thing I do is special case ".py" :) In general "." is a delimiter, EXCEPT for "py" so that it doesn't interfere with me typing python files

The problem with "." as a delimiter is that, unlike written English, it is actually pretty common in the computer world -- for instance, file extensions -- .jpg, .txt, .md.

Re: Show HN: I automated half of my typing

#210

Post by j45 » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 5:35 AM UTC

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #120

Exuma wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hit this invisible wall at about 165 WPM that I can't just get beyond, and it kills me. I wonder how fast I could get with stenography... I see dem 400 WPM videos and they look awesome.

Curious what kind of work you are doing where WPM is a limiting factor. I’m in software, like a lot of people here, so being able to type in speed is rarely the limiting factor. Besides stenographers, the only other line of work off the top of my head that needs this kind of speed are people who are paid to write subtitles for TV shows and movies in another language. Which I guess is just another form of stenography,…

It might not be a limiting factor as much as an enabling factor.

Sometimes being able to type fast can also mean thinking broad or deep quickly.

Coding at WPM is very different than communicating at WPM. The latter might be valuable.

If you can type faster you can help teammates a bit more easily.

WPM isn’t a high score for me, but there’s probably a floor.

Virtual assistants for example is one area where the average of 3 typeracers can be interesting.

In fairness to your comment, the ability to speak to text accurately can be faster than typing too, and maybe it’s a combination of clarity meeting WPM.