!!Con 2021 - Cursorless: keyboards and mice are sooo last year!! by Pokey Rule
1Cursorless: keyboards and mice are sooo last year!! by Pokey Rule
“swap funky fine whale”. As a human being, which I assume you are, my dear reader (sorry bots!), this phrase probably doesn’t mean a whole lot to you. But my computer snaps to action, swapping a particular pair of functions. I am going to talk about Cursorless, a voice coding tool I developed on top of Talon and VSCode that helped me turn accessibility into a super power.
When editing code with a keyboard and mouse, your world centers around a little cursor. So, naturally, initial work on code editing by voice also centered around the same little cursor. But why should we be restricted by what works well with a keyboard? When two landscape designers discuss a design, they’re not stuck with a laser pointer and a hundred small buttons, they say “move the red vase to the top corner”. Let’s bring the same fluency to coding. And hey, maybe I’ll make a keyboard version of the tool to make coding a bit more accessible for people stuck with a keyboard and mouse 😉.
Pokey is a freelance software engineer who will happily spend 3 weeks optimizing his coding setup to shave 10 seconds off a 5-minute task. He enjoys running, wild swimming and crocheting various and sundry small animals while coding by voice. Find him on Twitter at @PokeyRule and in the Talon slack workspace at @pokey.