[Talk Proposal] Bring This to That: Voice-Based Structural Editing with Cursorless and Talon

[Will-Sommers]

Abstract
So I started two ambitious plans at the start of the year — working out at home a few days a week and trying to potty train our 7-month old daughter! I started to experience wrist pain earlier about 6 weeks later. This was the impetus for me to begin to examine what it would take to reduce his typing input, with a special focus on avoiding 3 character combinations and repetitive strikes.

This talk will primarily be focused on voice coding and navigating, with an eye towards using voice to help address the rising complexity of our interfaces and key combos. While we aren’t trained to remember hundreds of key combos, we are very practiced in commanding complex vocabulary with a high degree of nuance.

This talk will have 3 parts.

• Path dependence, why are we here now
• Cursorless demo of structural editing, how is it different than syntax editing
• Tree-sitter deep dive, ASTs, tree walking and user-defined language scopes for editing

Given time, we could go pretty deep into either structural editing, tree-sitter or path dependence. I hope to close making a pitch that any engineer should consider bringing voice into their stack. There’s something so nice about reading code while reclining, sans keyboard!

Bio
A few months ago, full stack developer Will Sommers started to experience wrist pain. He began to examine what it would take to reduce his typing input, with a special focus on avoiding 3 character combinations and repetitive strikes. He discovered the Talon and Cursorless communities and is now a contributor to Cursorless.

Will is a software engineer and lives in Brooklyn. NYC.rb was one of his first meetups and a friendly intro to the NYC tech community. While he uses TypeScript more than Ruby these days, he's served as the technical copy editor for a few books on Ruby(POODR, Rails Tutorial v4 & v5).