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Comment by tikkun | Hacker News Reader

Idea for extending this: keylogger (yeah, that's a downside...) that'll watch what you type, learn common phrases, identify common ones, then come up with shortcuts, then each time you type the full phrase it gently reminds you of the shortcut.

Then anyone can install it, no friction, and over time it'll slowly start making you gently more productive.

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I wanted to build a keyboard with a keylogger built-in that autocompletes for you with the press of a special key. My idea was to keep the data in a secure vault on device, so that it could not become a security risk.

The Warp CLI kiiiind of does this, but only in the context of interacting with the shell.

You could do some of this with an input method editor (IME). It's pretty much an authorized keylogger that can edit your inputs, and is mainly needed for Chinese/Japanese typing. An IME that provides English autocomplete on the desktop (like phones) or shortcuts using an IME framework (like fcitx5) would be an interesting concept.

I wonder how that's work?

Something like auto export slack history each week, get a word frequency. Then mantually assign a bunch of expansions based on what you see?

I'm imagining it would be a native desktop app, so that it goes across all apps.

I went down the rabbithole trying to prototype something like this.

Bluetooth Keyboard -> ESP32 as a keyboard host -> Send keystrokes to USB & File

If you have cash there is a USB/PS2 keyboard logger that will capture data to disk.

Would it be better to have some standardized abbreviation? It could gravitate towards those. That should help consistency between different computers (also helps if you have multiple computers..)

I once built a typing tutor that did something like this - it monitored all the mistakes I'd make, and would surface the most typo-ed words for practice.

I thought about using a keylogger as a data source, but then I'd have to wait another 6 months to have 6 months worth of data :)

PhraseExpress does this.

Its not a keylogger in itself, its a tool to configure your keylogger.

I guess you are half right, the tool this repo configures is a shortcut engine (autokey). It has access to the key presses, but afaik does not log them.

of course, I was just using the same terminology as the OP

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