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Comment by elanning | Hacker News Reader

I have suffered from fairly bad RSI/tendonitis issues since my early 20s. Now a days I have a split keyboard and use wasd keys for my mouse, which is slower, but causes less pain. I would not wish this kind of pain on anyone. It has greatly negatively impacted my life. Hopefully future treatments will give some help, the current treatments are very lackluster.

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That makes two of us. For the last year I have considered abandoning my job as a developer. 8 hours in front of the computer 5 days a week really wears you down. I do find temporary relief after having exercised. But the pain quickly returns if I start working again, even if I have a standing desk, ergonomic keyboard, touchpad and mouse.

Sorry to hear. I hope you find something that works for you. I wish I could help, but like me, I'm sure you've already researched most solutions.

Yes I spent a considerable amount of money to upgrade my workstation to be more ergonomic. But I still have a lot of things left to try. It kind of hurts to spend $400+ for a single keyboard though, haha.

I have even thought about buying a Mac just to be able to use the built-in Voice Control feature. But they are really expensive, and the new Mac Mini didn't have enough ports for my monitors.

My project, Talon, is free and cross platform. It might have some options that can help you: https://talonvoice.com

Some blog posts:

- https://www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/hands-free-coding/

- https://www.admiralbumblebee.com/music/2021/01/18/Reaper-Day...

- http://nsaphra.github.io/post/hands/

Some talks:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKYWt8B9hgs

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKuRkGkf5HU

- https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-11436-accessible_input_for_reader...

Thanks for the tip. I've come across Talon before, but never tried it. I can't use it at work because it would drive my co-workers insane, but maybe I could learn it for use at home. Can the commands be easily switched to non-english words? Also does it work with any language? I mainly use JS, HTML, CSS, Rust and C#.

One of the reasons why I was thinking of buying a Mac to use Voice Control is because it also enables dictation, which helps a lot when chatting and writing emails. It also supports my native language.

The main speech engine is English. Due to the large amount of open data available for English model training, even if you have a strong accent, you'll probably get better command accuracy by tweaking Englishy commands rather than trying to use a lower accuracy engine for your native language. (By Englishy I do mean you can say a non-existent or non-English word, ask the engine what it heard, and map that semi-phonetic result to a command.)

It's extremely customizable, there's plumbing in the open source config repo for programming language specific commands and adding support for new text editors and such. There is a dictation mode. The current public English engine isn't the best for dictation yet, but it supports switching engine between command/dictation mode.

There's an online WebSpeech dictation-only engine in the beta which has extremely good dictation accuracy for most languages, as well as vosk in the beta for offline dictation (vosk has e.g. a decent German model).

The Stenomask is one option for using voice control in an office environment where you don't want to make noise.

Alright, thanks for the explanation. I'll try it out in a week or so I think. If I like it I'll donate some money.

Have you ever considered open sourcing Talon? Because as far as I can see it is closed source right now.

Yup, I have had tendonitis in my forearms since I was 19, hurts pretty much all the time. Still not sure if i'm ever going to get rid of it or if I need to just keep dealing with it.

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