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.

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.