Using color and letter (expanded to a word) to disambiguate target words is a clever idea. I wonder how the target words were picked. I see “urge” and “bat” in the first example - I guess short words? The phonetic alphabet is all two and three syllables, which I guess would be longer.
i think in the recently popular strange loop talk, the creator said that he picked short single syllable words for the purposes of making cursorless easier to use (for ‘h’, harp was used as the anchor in that talk).
As mentioned, colors can be disabled and replaced with shapes. I guess introducing multiple multiple modes just makes it easier to avoid rarer letters.
Re: Go syntax, I wish the type declaration for a pointer were var tptr &T instead of *T. The problem is that star in an expression means “dereference” but in a type declaration it means “reference.” It would be better if star were always deref and ampersand was always ref.
Yeah, this is what I’m going at with my idea for a spoken syntax refresh of the Go language. In my ideal world, when you are dealing with Go spoken, you should not have to care about pointer values in the traditional sense. You should only care if it is raised or you need to lower it.
cap of type raised client => `c *Client`
raise this => add a &
lower this => add a *
This is one of the places where Rust really gets things correct. An & creates a reference and an & is the type of a reference. If only we could have nice things.
Has the Cursorless author tried doing how some keyboard based browsers tag links? “ag” “zc” “fe” etc.
I really love the color idea.
@cadey have you tried changing keyboard layouts (I know I’m asking the obvious, but I haven’t seen anyone else ask or mentioned - maybe I skimmed over it in the post)? I used to have bad RSI until I switched to Dvorak 10 years ago. I’ve been typing 100wpm all day every day since and no pain, not even subtle traces.
I use a custom variant of colemak. I’m pretty sure that what I’m fucking up is that my posture for using the mouse is very incorrect. I’ll figure it out. I just gotta give my hands a break for a week or two.
Since you mention mouse posture being your problem: me too, like 25 years ago. I eliminated the problem by switching to left-hand mousing. I can’t promise a quick learning curve (though if you’re fuckin’ with Colemak, you enjoy muscle memory abuse at some level) but I can predict that by the time you are even barely competent mousing with your non-dominant side, the pain in your dominant one will be a lot better.
I stopped doing all the (absurdly, ridiculously) bad postures that were wrecking me before when I switched over to the left, and this + luck means I have not had an RSI problem develop in my left side. I did have some pain on my dominant side reappear briefly about 10 years ago, after 18 months of way too much laptop hacking on the couch, but fixed that with a split+ tented keyboard and again, not being such an idiot practicing more self-care about my posture. Hope this N=1 case study helps.
P.S. Thanks for the article! I am always interested in how hands-free coding is evolving.
I switched to left handed mouse usage about 20 years ago for the same reason, and haven’t had any issues since either.
I think it took me about 2-3 weeks to train my brain to be accurate enough with my left hand not to have to think about it anymore. I continued to play fast paced games with my right hand.
One of the worst parts is buying mice. So many are exclusively designed for right-handed use!
I’ve seen some people recommend switching to a trackball. Fortunately I’ve not had the need to resort to that.
I also find that the mouse matters more than the keyboard. I had been using the Evoluent VerticalMouse but even that doesn’t feel comfortable anymore. Instead I use an old Wacom Intuos4 graphics tablet. It’s way more comfortable and the absolute positioning is great once you get used to it.
I’ve been using a full sized IBM model M keyboard (QWERTY layout) for well over twenty-five years and I’ve never had a problem with RSI. Yet, when I attempt to use either a cheap keyboard, or the keyboards that come on laptops, I can feel my hands cramping up. Perhaps the issue is crappy keyboards?
See this related thread about the Cursorless talk from Strange Loop 2023
Using color and letter (expanded to a word) to disambiguate target words is a clever idea. I wonder how the target words were picked. I see “urge” and “bat” in the first example - I guess short words? The phonetic alphabet is all two and three syllables, which I guess would be longer.
i think in the recently popular strange loop talk, the creator said that he picked short single syllable words for the purposes of making cursorless easier to use (for ‘h’, harp was used as the anchor in that talk).
But it doesn’t work on monochromatic screens, such as for e-ink.
You can use shapes too: https://www.cursorless.org/docs/#shapes
Or probably the larger issue is for people who have degraded colour vision which could make it rather annoying
As mentioned, colors can be disabled and replaced with shapes. I guess introducing multiple multiple modes just makes it easier to avoid rarer letters.
Re: Go syntax, I wish the type declaration for a pointer were
var tptr &Tinstead of*T. The problem is that star in an expression means “dereference” but in a type declaration it means “reference.” It would be better if star were always deref and ampersand was always ref.Yeah, this is what I’m going at with my idea for a spoken syntax refresh of the Go language. In my ideal world, when you are dealing with Go spoken, you should not have to care about pointer values in the traditional sense. You should only care if it is raised or you need to lower it.
This is one of the places where Rust really gets things correct. An & creates a reference and an & is the type of a reference. If only we could have nice things.
Has the Cursorless author tried doing how some keyboard based browsers tag links? “ag” “zc” “fe” etc.
I really love the color idea.
@cadey have you tried changing keyboard layouts (I know I’m asking the obvious, but I haven’t seen anyone else ask or mentioned - maybe I skimmed over it in the post)? I used to have bad RSI until I switched to Dvorak 10 years ago. I’ve been typing 100wpm all day every day since and no pain, not even subtle traces.
I use a custom variant of colemak. I’m pretty sure that what I’m fucking up is that my posture for using the mouse is very incorrect. I’ll figure it out. I just gotta give my hands a break for a week or two.
Since you mention mouse posture being your problem: me too, like 25 years ago. I eliminated the problem by switching to left-hand mousing. I can’t promise a quick learning curve (though if you’re fuckin’ with Colemak, you enjoy muscle memory abuse at some level) but I can predict that by the time you are even barely competent mousing with your non-dominant side, the pain in your dominant one will be a lot better.
I stopped doing all the (absurdly, ridiculously) bad postures that were wrecking me before when I switched over to the left, and this + luck means I have not had an RSI problem develop in my left side. I did have some pain on my dominant side reappear briefly about 10 years ago, after 18 months of way too much laptop hacking on the couch, but fixed that with a split+ tented keyboard and again,
not being such an idiotpracticing more self-care about my posture. Hope this N=1 case study helps.P.S. Thanks for the article! I am always interested in how hands-free coding is evolving.
I switched to left handed mouse usage about 20 years ago for the same reason, and haven’t had any issues since either.
I think it took me about 2-3 weeks to train my brain to be accurate enough with my left hand not to have to think about it anymore. I continued to play fast paced games with my right hand.
One of the worst parts is buying mice. So many are exclusively designed for right-handed use!
I’ve seen some people recommend switching to a trackball. Fortunately I’ve not had the need to resort to that.
I also find that the mouse matters more than the keyboard. I had been using the Evoluent VerticalMouse but even that doesn’t feel comfortable anymore. Instead I use an old Wacom Intuos4 graphics tablet. It’s way more comfortable and the absolute positioning is great once you get used to it.
I’ve been using a full sized IBM model M keyboard (QWERTY layout) for well over twenty-five years and I’ve never had a problem with RSI. Yet, when I attempt to use either a cheap keyboard, or the keyboards that come on laptops, I can feel my hands cramping up. Perhaps the issue is crappy keyboards?
The problem with that style of marker is that it takes up a lot of space. The hats that we use are designed to fit between lines
All those colored dots seem very distracting at first glance? Do you unsee them after a while?
Absolutely. Users often complain in the first couple days that the hats are distracting, but almost invariably stop seeing them after about a week