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Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

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11–20 of 73 posts

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#12
post #11

Looks great! I've been dreaming about something that lets me use a headband and reads brainwaves to interact with a computer for a long time. Every 4-5 years I look into what's been happening on that front, but so far it seems like we're not even close.

I am hoping for an eye-tracking mouse solution in the meantime, where looking at a portion of the screen and pressing a key on the keyboard will click rather than having to move a hand away from the keyboard to use a mouse, or wait for the analog stick mouse to reach the right point of the screen. Seems to be getting more plausible but still fairly expensive for a few years yet.

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#14
Very interesting. Editing code at the level of text is too low, ideally it would be raised to the level of thought. We don't think in terms of characters changing, we think in terms of higher level block constructs. It's not about the increased typing speed, it's about reducing cognitive load and making problem solving more enjoyable. Pairing with the Unison-lang style system of direct AST manipulation could be revolutionary, if the difficulty doesn't prove too high.

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#17
Seems cool. However, I went down a several-hour rabbit hole trying to build non-documented dependencies and eventually gave up.

The reliance on mono/skiasharp makes this a far less portable application, and to say there is Linux support seems disingenuous. Binaries only exist for Ubuntu, the binaries are said to work for non-ubuntu systems but nuget fails to install them.

Building from scratch leads to several undocumented dependencies and I'm still receiving increasingly inscrutable build failures out of the box. Feels like 2005... My patience ran out.

If anyone on an RPM-based system gets everything up and running, drop me a line.

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#18

Seems cool. However, I went down a several-hour rabbit hole trying to build non-documented dependencies and eventually gave up. The reliance on mono/skiasharp makes this a far less portable application, and to say there is Linux support seems disingenuous. Binaries only exist for Ubuntu, the binaries are said to work for non-ubuntu systems but nuget fails to install them. Building from scratch leads to several undocu…

You talking about Talon? It comes with all of the dependencies. Use ./run.sh to set the library path and ask on the Slack if there are any further issues.

(fwiw it's not skiasharp itself, it's just the mono/skia repo, which is C++)

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#19
post #7

This kind of work is also fantastic for those who have limited mobility or use of hands. On top of that, it's also a comforting peace of mind for the rest of us that should we ever e.g. lose our hands in a car collision, we might still have a successful path forward in our programming careers and passions. Reminds me of a talk I once saw where a developer developed arthritis and couldn't program effectively anymore,…

I was very inspired by a blind programmer who uses text to speech at inhuman speeds. https://www.parhamdoustdar.com/2016/03/27/autobiography-blin...

That's perhaps an extreme example of what is possible but it's incredible what people can adapt to.

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#20
post #11

Looks great! I've been dreaming about something that lets me use a headband and reads brainwaves to interact with a computer for a long time. Every 4-5 years I look into what's been happening on that front, but so far it seems like we're not even close.

I am hoping for an eye-tracking mouse solution in the meantime, where looking at a portion of the screen and pressing a key on the keyboard will click rather than having to move a hand away from the keyboard to use a mouse, or wait for the analog stick mouse to reach the right point of the screen. Seems to be getting more plausible but still fairly expensive for a few years yet.

Talon has an eye tracking mouse, the necessary hardware runs around $250.
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