Author of the article here, kinda surprised to see this doing so well here. But in case you're all interested, here's my repo of Talon stuff I'm experimenting with: https://github.com/Xe/invocations
I dunno. My wrists are mostly good, but my knuckles aren't always, thanks to the early-onset osteoarthritis that comes with the family hands. I expect there will come days when it would be, if not absolutely necessary, then at least a lot less painful to work this way than with a keyboard, so I'm glad to know there's a viable option.
I'm glad you wrote it up, and that it got to the front page here strikes me as HN working as intended.
This stuff is really worth of taking the effort to learn at least once.
I didn't actually write this up per se :P Technically, I dictated it and there's probably some gnarly typos with homophones in there that I haven't totally eliminated because it was a bit of a fire and forget piece, where I was just dumping my thoughts on a topic.
I mean technically you wouldn't have written it up even with a keyboard, so... :D
And yeah, even notwithstanding the massive accessibility benefit, I can see use in learning it just for the sake of a new lens on how to navigate code. Sort of the same reason I'm looking forward to the big Emacs 29 update on all my machines around the end of the year - among other things, I get to find out firsthand whether I'm as excited as I should be for first class tree-sitter, or not excited enough.
But for VS Code folks, this is already right there and I can't imagine not wanting to play around at least a bit with it and see what it can do.
Have you considered strength training? Strengthening your grip can lessen the pain of arthritis in the hands. Exercises like deadlifts and bent over barbell rows will give you a very strong grip. (People assume it's all about the big muscles but grip strength is actually one of the main limiting factors for deadlift progression!)
That seems to have helped me a lot. I developed chronic pain in my knuckles from typing. I've had it for about seven years.
I started strength training this year, for other reasons. Using a rowing machine irritated my fingers, so I thought I'd have to avoid things like deadlifts and pullups. But I started using heavy clubs, which really work the grip but with the force pulling in a different direction. I've at least doubled my grip strength with those, and my fingers are a lot better now in general. (Now I'm doing deadlifts and rows too.)
Other things that helped before this:
- Switching to mech keyboards, and training myself to type without bottoming out the keys. When the problem first developed it was so bad I worried my career was ending. Mech keyboards fixed that.
- Holding my hands in ice water for ten minutes each, once a day. First two minutes are super painful, then the rest isn't bad. After a while you get used to it and the first part is all right too. That was more for acute relief when it was getting bad, and it made a huge difference. I've seen at least one study saying it works, too.
If you struggle with deadlifts, a farmer walk with something heavy works wonders as well. I can wake up with my hands aching, get some walks in, and the pain is down to 25% or so. Inflammation feels reduced, hand moves more fluidly, and it doesn’t come back quickly unless it’s very damp and cold.
Farmer walks are amazing and I encourage people to do them more. Deadlifts are awesome for all kinds of reasons too; walks are definitely not a replacement, just a great alternative as far as hands go.
I have written about it here before, but I also suffer from pretty bad arthritis in my knuckles, I am only 37 and this has been the case for almost a decade.
After trying many things, the thing that helped me the most was switching to a super low pressure rubber dome keyboard and typing softly. I use a Sun Type 7 but really any keyboard with super low pressure keys would probably do.
Just want to say, I love your writing -- it's rare to find someone with such a distinctive voice. I've read a bunch of your articles and posts, keep going!
Thank you, I'm very glad that the transition to dictation hasn't made me lose a lot of the je ne sais quoi of my voice when writing. I have been using dictation to write my conference talks for a while; but, I have started doing it for my blog very recently. This may be one of those "curse of the artist" type things, but when I read my dictated articles, they just look very different than the ones that I have typed out. I'm not sure how, but they're just different.
I know for me I to see these kinds of setups (like every eMacs setup) and realize that my neuro divergence is very different than others
I freeze in awe at how much context and abstractions you have to keep in your head to just navigate and grok what’s happening. It’s like three layers of abstraction and having decades of fluency in a language and IDE/CLI.
“ After a while, they just become second nature like Vim commands do. I have been forcing myself to use this over and over again for the past few days and it's starting to become second nature.”
Ha yeah that does seem like what it would take to learn to use this.
I’ve been making computers go brrrr for 30 years and this level of coding fluency will never not confuse and impress me.
Fwiw the finger contortions needed by eMacs were also giving me RSIs - other than cutting my computer use (basically don’t spend every waking moment typing) I switched to vim since I figured its modal nature would require fewer multi-finger combos. I’ve been mostly free of issues for over 15 years now.
I make it a point to always press the modifier key with my other hand to reduce finger contortions. For pressing multiple modifiers, I take my hand off of home row to avoid using my pinky. (I also use a ortho-linear mechanical keyboard with thumb clusters and a Colemak-DH layout.)
Keyboards with thumb clusters are definitely the best option, but in my experience, even on a normal keyboard, simply remapping your keys makes a world of difference.
Here are some of my most useful remaps:
- Swap enter and semicolon. Enter is one of my most used keys. It should be "directly accessible"
- Make right command backspace. Backspace is another key I very commonly use, but it's far away and causes a lot of pain. Now, it's right under my thumb! (Regular backspace key is now forward delete).
- Make caps lock and enter control. (When pressed with other keys). This is useful for Emacs commands.
- Caps lock is escape when not pressed with other keys.
- Enter is semicolon when not pressed with other keys.
The "when not pressed with other keys" stuff is interesting. I never thought about that. The only trouble I can see with this is being unable to type effectively on a normie keyboard. I've had the ctrl/caps swap for years and I regular mess it up on a normie keyboard, although it's no big deal to accidentally press caps, of course. What I like is my portable mechanical keyboard has a physical switch, so it works whatever computer I plug it in to.
Even though, as I wrote above, Emacs does not require finger contortions, I do do finger contortions. I doubt I'll ever stop using Emacs but I have always been a little concerned about my little fingers ("pinkies"). So the options seem to be either evil mode, or a new keyboard, both of which require busting a decade's worth of muscle memory...
Afaik that's in-progress, and the goal is support for other editors, but it's not there yet. Vanilla talon (what cursorless is built on) works fine everywhere though! (You just don't get the AST transforms.)
Thank you for writing it. This whole post has made me really curious and I've taken the dive into Talon, already having written an app layer for Warp terminal and exposing my (normally not detected) terminal emacs to Talon.
I'm not too interested in Cursorless I don't use VSCode and vim/evil mode text objects are equally powerful (and less visually noisy). Very excited by this whole concept.
This is the shit. Thank you so much for sharing. I had remembered seeing Talon before, but I did not know you could do this with it. It did not click until today. I have been messing with it all day. Its so much fun. This is a lot closer to how I would expect all of those voice assistants to work. Its also really fun working with a computer like this.
I want to see a study teaching people to code using their voice versus with typing and then also by hand.
