4 ms·

Yeah, the high frequency input capabilities of hands/fingers on keyboard are pretty remarkable and hard to beat, especially in conjunction with navigation tools

by szvsw 2y ago

Yeah, the high frequency input capabilities of hands/fingers on keyboard are pretty remarkable and hard to beat, especially in conjunction with navigation tools like vim and especially when you start considering things like stenography applied in a programming context (intellisense/copilot etc can in some ways be be considered a form of that already). I suspect natural language speech is too slow, but i do sometimes wonder if the only other part of our body capable of such high throughput (and the requisite fine motor control) is our mouth/tongue… I’ve always wondered what a programming language optimized for spoken input would look/sound like. Edit: mentioned this in another comment, but I think graph based visual programming languages would actually be pretty well suited to speech entry, especially with shorthands for common operations like “create node” := “kurr” or “connect” := “kuh”.

cess11 2y ago
Typing speed seems like a rather junior concern. In practice most time tends to be spent thinking or cycling through edits and inspecting test results. I think putting your tests in a watch -n 2 on the second screen would be a much better improvement than fiddling with some reinvention of stenography.
- smaudet 2y ago
  This is still not helped by other input methods, stenography helps with the navigation too... Ctrl clicking though symbols is all well and good but you often want or need to do much more complicated things than that. So, yes, input speed is still a problem for reading and understanding code, too.
- szvsw 2y ago
  I agree that typing probably is not the limiting factor in most cases and for most people, and so the conversation might seem a little silly… But that’s precisely because typing is fast. Once you know what you are doing, you start typing and you are done relatively quickly, and probably spent a lot of the time typing thinking about what you would do next… but we are specifically talking about a scenario where typing is the limiting factor, or even entirely infeasible, for a variety of reasons.
conartist6 2y ago
Check out https://www.cursorless.org https://www.cursorless.org

by szvsw 2y ago

cess11 2y ago

Typing speed seems like a rather junior concern. In practice most time tends to be spent thinking or cycling through edits and inspecting test results. I think putting your tests in a watch -n 2 on the second screen would be a much better improvement than fiddling with some reinvention of stenography.

smaudet 2y ago
This is still not helped by other input methods, stenography helps with the navigation too... Ctrl clicking though symbols is all well and good but you often want or need to do much more complicated things than that. So, yes, input speed is still a problem for reading and understanding code, too.
szvsw 2y ago
I agree that typing probably is not the limiting factor in most cases and for most people, and so the conversation might seem a little silly… But that’s precisely because typing is fast. Once you know what you are doing, you start typing and you are done relatively quickly, and probably spent a lot of the time typing thinking about what you would do next… but we are specifically talking about a scenario where typing is the limiting factor, or even entirely infeasible, for a variety of reasons.

conartist6 2y ago

Check out https://www.cursorless.org https://www.cursorless.org