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Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

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Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#61

Post by soulofmischief »

lunixbochs wrote: post #55
jstanley wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Re your deleted comment about "hostile forks": allowing users to run whatever software they want is precisely the point of open source. It's not "hostile" to have different opinions to you. The project looks cool nonetheless, but it is still true that if the users don't control the software, the software controls the users.

I'll repost that in sibling. I just realized that I'd rather have people saying "ah, typical of proprietary software to not support Linux" than "your work has no value because I can't compete with you using your own code". I'm not going to stop supporting Linux because of this, but it still seems like a backwards incentive. This is a business, not a pet project. I work on it full time and it is my meager source of in…

After you got me pointed in the right direction, I've been enjoying learning the ropes. I appreciate what you're doing and will subscribe to your Patreon if I find Talon to be a permanent addition to my workflow. Please don't stop supporting Linux :)

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#62

Post by harryvederci »

lunixbochs wrote: post #55
jstanley wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Re your deleted comment about "hostile forks": allowing users to run whatever software they want is precisely the point of open source. It's not "hostile" to have different opinions to you. The project looks cool nonetheless, but it is still true that if the users don't control the software, the software controls the users.

I'll repost that in sibling. I just realized that I'd rather have people saying "ah, typical of proprietary software to not support Linux" than "your work has no value because I can't compete with you using your own code". I'm not going to stop supporting Linux because of this, but it still seems like a backwards incentive. This is a business, not a pet project. I work on it full time and it is my meager source of in…

Just out of curiousity: would it be possible to set some kind of donation target, where you'd be okay with open sourcing Talon?

Maybe that would allow you to keep making a living from it as you currently are, as well as allow people to see the code at some point. (Note that I'm saying "see the code", as you could just open source it without accepting contributions.)

Personally I'd be more willing to pay for a product if I knew that my payments helped open source it.

Not saying you should, just wanted to mention it as a possible solution.

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#63

Post by ParetoOptimal »

soulofmischief wrote: post #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 undocu…

You can likely get support for many platforms with the unofficial nix expression for talon on the slack.

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#64

Post by ParetoOptimal »

Jemm wrote: post #4

I find it annoying that they are not using the standard phoenetic alphabet

As someone who has voice coded full-time for a long period of time, that would get quite annoying.

Notice that some users even start using Talon's noise support. I even changed "scroll up" to "suh" because I said it 300 times per day.

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#65

Post by auscompgeek »

LionTamer wrote: post #9

I wonder if there’s room for integration with Vim/Neovim or the plugins in that ecosystem - I feel like there’s a strong overlap between the “vim language” of text objects, motions, etc and the structure editing this project is working with.

We have plans for adding a keyboard interface [0] at least, though it's still an open discussion. If you're after straight Neovim support though, perhaps nvim-treesitter-textobjects [1] might tickle your fancy?

[0]: https://github.com/cursorless-dev/cursorless/issues/710

[1]: https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter-textobjec...

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#66

Post by jstanley »

lunixbochs wrote: post #56
jstanley wrote: post #43

To anyone tempted to get into Talon: note that it is very much not open source - https://talonvoice.com/EULA.txt (except when you contibute code to them; in that case you implicitly license your code as open source, but theirs is still their property).

> very much not open source I contribute quite a bit to open source as part of my work on Talon, including the speech engine, the tools I use for model training and dataset creation, and I've upstreamed security fixes and other improvements to core projects like CPython and LibUSB. > except when you contribute code to them That clause isn't for code contributed to the Talon app, it's so other users in the community c…

> I contribute quite a bit to open source as part of my work on Talon

That's good and admirable! It doesn't change the fact that Talon is not open source, which makes it risky for users to come to depend on it.

I'm not trying to change your mind on whether Talon is open source. You can do whatever you want. The only reason I posted the comment was that I landed on your documentation site at first[0] and I mistook it for an open source project, only to find out later that I was mistaken.

[0] https://talonvoice.com/docs/

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#67

Post by lunixbochs »

jstanley wrote: post #66
lunixbochs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very much not open source I contribute quite a bit to open source as part of my work on Talon, including the speech engine, the tools I use for model training and dataset creation, and I've upstreamed security fixes and other improvements to core projects like CPython and LibUSB. > except when you contribute code to them That clause isn't for code contributed to the Talon app, it's so other users in the community c…

> I contribute quite a bit to open source as part of my work on Talon That's good and admirable! It doesn't change the fact that Talon is not open source, which makes it risky for users to come to depend on it. I'm not trying to change your mind on whether Talon is open source. You can do whatever you want. The only reason I posted the comment was that I landed on your documentation site at first[0] and I mistook it…

I am responding in this way because your top post heavily implies details that are not the case:

- "very much not open source": Talon has a lot of open-source code, including the users' entire custom voice user interface necessary to replicate their setup on a different app (if a compatible app were to exist).

- "except when you contribute code to them": This is simply not the case, users are sharing the code in question with each other as customizations in the community chat. None of that user code ends up "in Talon".

---

Please read the handsfreecoding post. I have mitigated the continuity risks (e.g. bus factor) of being closed source, and I am fundamentally against selling out. It is extremely important to me ideologically that Talon is free and will continue to be free.

Talon is the best option for a lot of people to use their computer without pain. I would not have quit my job and spent years full-time developing Talon under an open source model. To my knowledge I am the only person currently working full-time on this problem.

Please understand that if you convince someone to not use Talon for this reason, their alternative may not be "use some other software", it may be "computers continue to cause them literal pain".

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#68

Post by jstanley »

lunixbochs wrote: post #67
jstanley wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I contribute quite a bit to open source as part of my work on Talon That's good and admirable! It doesn't change the fact that Talon is not open source, which makes it risky for users to come to depend on it. I'm not trying to change your mind on whether Talon is open source. You can do whatever you want. The only reason I posted the comment was that I landed on your documentation site at first[0] and I mistook it…

I am responding in this way because your top post heavily implies details that are not the case: - "very much not open source": Talon has a lot of open-source code, including the users' entire custom voice user interface necessary to replicate their setup on a different app (if a compatible app were to exist). - "except when you contribute code to them": This is simply not the case, users are sharing the code in ques…

I have read the handsfreecoding post now. It sounds like Talon is a really great tool for the people who need it and it is much closer to open source than ~any other proprietary software I am aware of. If anyone deserves criticism for releasing software that does not respect its users, you're far from front of the queue. It's still true that Talon is not open source, and there are some people who will reject it on those grounds (I am one of them). But that's OK, you don't owe us anything.

Sorry for the misunderstandings I posted in my first comment, they came from a quick reading of the EULA - unfortunately I can't edit that comment now.

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#69

Post by lunixbochs »

jbaber wrote: post #22
NJRBailey wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. I hate focus-follows-mouse, but would love focus-follows-gaze.

There's an open issue for me to implement that: https://github.com/talonvoice/talon/issues/487

Re: Cursorless – A spoken language for structural code editing

#70

Post by foerbert »

lunixbochs wrote: post #50
foerbert wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some very mixed feelings about talon. I looked into it a decent bit when I started having hand issues as well, and never got anywhere useful with it. 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 a…

I agree the non programmer use of Talon is still unpolished. That was an intentional prioritization as I work to solidify the underlying tech. Note that your best option for documentation right now is the Slack, where I am very active. I have a clear vision for easier customization and adaptation in the long term. Maybe check back every now and then, it's a labor of love and I plan to continue improving it for a long…

Well, I am a programmer, I just wasn't able to do much programming due to physical limitations. Admittedly I'm not much of a Python programmer, and I wouldn't be surprised if a deeper understanding of not-just-a-shell-script Python idioms helped me get a little more out of the REPL poking. But uh, still.

As for Slack, I don't really consider that documentation. It's not really usable in the same way. It's more akin to IRC. It's potentially very helpful, even when the documentation isn't helping, but it's not the same thing. Maybe I'm just old, even though I'm not that old... I think...

Anyway, I hope this doesn't come off too negatively overall. I really like the idea of Talon and I'm comforted by it's existence, in case my hands start acting up again. From my attempts to investigate it I got a few glimpses into just how deep you've gone, even down into the speech model itself, to make it what it is. And I know any interface to something as complex as this is itself a large series of extremely ambiguous trade-offs that's just painful to make. And of course documentation itself takes time to create, and then needs to be kept up to date, and all that. I get it.

If it didn't seem to hold much promise, I wouldn't be so sour about failing to figure out how to use it effectively.

One thing that might be worth considering is moving to a source-available model, if full on Open Source doesn't suit your goals. Having the option to try to figure things out by looking at the code could be very helpful.

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