31–40 of 73 posts
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…
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 think able-bodied programmers will probably get annoyed setting it up, setting talon up, learning the phonetic alphabet and basic commands, but like.. if your hands don't work, this can literally save your career. this is a disability aid for creating things, it's vital and empowering!
the hard part IMO is getting back into the coding headspace you had when you could type. it's different speaking code, formatting it in your head before you say command phrases. everything's a little awkward, you can't get into the zone the same way.
Cursorless is fantastic, this saved my bacon last year when I couldn't use my hands for months. I donate to Pokey because I'll need this again in the future, though right now I'm typing okay. I think able-bodied programmers will probably get annoyed setting it up, setting talon up, learning the phonetic alphabet and basic commands, but like.. if your hands don't work, this can literally save your career. this is a di…
For one, it needs to be programmed to do anything. This gets you all the options, which is wonderful, but also is a bit of a problem when you're looking into because you can't, ya know, program. And it's not a simple thing to interact with. Lots of moving parts and various behind-the-scenes interactions.
For another, there's virtually zero documentation. Like, officially none, and unofficially not much more than a few paragraphs.
And to put the cherry on top, it's a closed source mess of a program. It's not easy to get much in the way of useful information out of it. You can poke around some in a Python REPL, but that'll basically just get you the interface. And somehow, it's one of the most useful sources of information, as at least you've got something to go on. And as mentioned, Python, so you don't have much in the way of language-level guarantees to try to rely on to figure stuff out either.
Yes, there is the popular user config. To be clear, I'm not trying to be unkind to it. It managed to overcome a lot, and is very useful to lots of people for many of the reasons I stated above. But. It's also clearly got it's roots as one person's personal config that got popular. There is so much in there. It's basically it's whole own thing to learn on top of talon.
In terms of learning from it, well, it doesn't seem trivial. It's basically it's whole own thing, but also how it all interacts is all talon. You're basically learning two separate yet intertwined systems at once and have to figure out what bits belong to what. It's also got various bits from multiple iterations of talon's interface, so the same thing may be accomplished multiple ways. It's actually quite well commented in some places about this fact, which is really nice. But it does make you wonder what isn't well commented...
Ultimately I just gave up. It seems like a potentially hugely useful thing, but actually trying to use it required learning a bunch of stuff I wasn't otherwise interested in, figuring out the minutia of a complex unstable interface the hardest ways possible, and then spending a ton of time writing my own program/config.
Aside from the time involved, the amount of typing required was prohibitive.
So yeah. My feelings on talon... mixed, to say the least. Or most, judging by the above.
It would also be interesting to test brain interfaces on this language some day.
I am thinking about alternative input method for my project Glicol (https://glicol.org/) quite some time. This work is definitely inspiring. I am also thinking about how can we better support the blind with some feedback. If you have some suggestions, please let me know here:
I find it annoying that they are not using the standard phoenetic alphabet
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.
My experience with eye trackers was similar. The clicking thing is partially solvable with eye tracker + foot pedal combination, but the biggest turn off with eye tracker was poor support for wider monitors or multiple monitor setup. Eye trackers also require you to be in a certain distance from it which was affecting my posture.
These were some of the reasons why I've built Cursorly https://cursorly.app/ It's still in the early stage but I'd love to hear some feedback. There is a free trial for a few days, but let me know if you want to extended it, I'd be happy to do so.
Imho text editing speed is not an issue for programmers.
The speech recognition engine built for it is great and the whole thing is free of charge, though I do recommend donating on Patreon [2].
Cursorless is a nice rethinking-from-the-ground kind of project. However, you can just as well keep using your current tools.
I've used Talon on and off with Jetbrains IDEs when I had some wrist pain and the overall experience was great, with my coding speed being fast enough without much practice. When voice typing, autocomplete is also very useful, so the introduction of Copilot was an additional huge improvemet.
But overall, the design of Talon, its config files, and the way this leads to very easy customizability, is really great. A bit like making your whole OS easily automatable and programmable (even if your OS isn't emacs /s).