Talon

After having mild RSI symptoms for several years, over the course of two weeks in November 2019 my hand pain went from bothersome to unignorable. I tried and continue to try various ergonomic changes and physiotherapeutic exercises, but for the next six months I was unable to type for more than half an hour a day. In mid-2020 I got desperate enough to try to learn to code by voice.

On the recommendation of a friend, I tried Talon. It worked. Learning to code by voice is not easy: general-purpose programmable voice control tools like Talon have a steep learning curve and come with their own health risk in the form of voice strain. But it is doable, and it provided me a path back to coding when nothing else could. By late 2020, I was able to resume work, and became a co-maintainer of the de facto default set of Talon user scripts.

If you or someone you know could benefit from learning to code by voice, I offer video chat tutoring sessions for Talon, depending upon availability. Contact me for details and pricing. You can also find me on the Talon Slack as @rntz.

Here are some video demos of me showing how to perform various tasks in Talon, recorded and edited by ataraxy.consulting:

• Implementing the fibonacci function.
• Transcribing example code.
• Editing and correcting files.
• Using talon's captures feature to define complex custom commands.

These were recorded impromptu during regular Talon community zoom meetings, so I hope you'll understand if they are not as smooth as they could be.