What does HackerNews think of knausj_talon?
Config for talon for Mac, Windows and Linux. Very much in progress.
My setup, software:
- talon (https://talonvoice.com/), basing my configuration on the standard repo (https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon/), with some minor modifications. This is how I navigate my whole computer, and runs the voice recognition and eye tracking. This is how I'm typing this right now. There are also a bunch of other little system changes that you need to make (eg, on macOS, disable double space to type a period), which is documented by the community with varying levels of success.
- cursorless (https://www.cursorless.org/), and then vscode. Before this I used Sublime Text for years and years, but cursorless is too good for coding. I know there are some projects on going to port it to different editors, but I haven't massively looked into it.
- vimium extension for web browsing (works in both chrome and firefox). This makes things like clicking links easier with your voice, without having too use an eye tracker all the time.
And then hardware:
- DPA 4488 microphone -> DAD6001 microdot-XLR converter -> Shure X2U USB XLR interface. ~£800. It's a very expensive microphone, but it's what the developer of talon uses (same brand anyway), and since I'm using this for work I want to remove every obstacle to having my voice recognised correctly and quickly
- Tobii Eye Tracker 5. ~£250. This is basically the only game in town. It works well enough but needs a lot of light. It also needs to be physically mounted to a monitor. In theory this means I don't need to use a mouse, but because I have a 34" ultrawide it doesn't work well on the edges, so I have a specific window size and location configured (say "layout mouse") which I could move apps into if I need to.
- At some point soon I want to replace the X2U with something higher quality and more permanent on my desk. Soon!
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).
I was able to get a couple of simple commands to work in Chrome, sometimes, such as "reload" and "show history". In Visual Studio code, it just spouted a bunch of errors in the console [1], and in JetBrains Rider all it would do it type gobbledygook, like a cat had walked on the keyboard or something. Pretty dissapointing :(
The logs also fill up with "WARNING actions: skipped because they have no matching declaration: (user.select_next_token)".
It was a bit confusing to use too (apart from not really working, I mean!), as it wasn't clear if I had to use some kind of command to enable voice commands, or if it was litening all the time. Eventually I figured out that it seems to be the latter, but still, it's not clear what commands it has heard and understood - I found myself speaking and nothing was happening, and I had no idea what it had understood. Similarly, I'd say something like "close tab", and it would type some nonsense like "aa&" into the current file - again, no idea what command it was actually trying to use.
[0] https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon [1] "No such file or directory: 'C:\\Users\\MyUser\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\vscode-port'"