Index of John Sturdy's handsfree emacs pages

RSI

Emacs

Computing

I suffer from RSI (possibly brought on partly by chording in Emacs) and have devised a system for largely handsfree operation of Emacs (and through it, just about anything else online).

I am releasing this under the GPL, and it is available on SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/emacs-versor/. It has its own web pages, also on SourceForge.

Pedals

To start with, this uses two multiple programmable footswitches (from Kinesis) and taps into Emacs' text menu system for commands, and a narrow-channel Emacs navigation system I had written some time before.

See Using Emacs pedals for details.

Voice

I have now started to integrate this with voice input for further productivity, safety and flexibility.

Components

Versor

"VERsatile curSOR" is a narrow channel interface to navigating around emacs. At any time, you have a current dimension, and can move forward or backward in that dimension. You can also move backward or forward through a sequence of dimensions; and select one of several possible sequences, to suit what you're doing at the time.

Pedals

This is a set of key bindings aimed at using just a few keys, which are duplicated onto commercially-available footswitches. The footswitches I use come in sets of three, and these key bindings are designed for use with six keys: ctrl, shift, alt, and three command keys, which you can think of as "forward" (or "navigate"), "menu", and "aux".

Pedal menus

The pedal menu system is based on tmm.el, the text mode menus package that comes with emacs. It uses the menu pedal to bring up the menu, the forward pedal (and backward pedal if necessary) to move onto the right entry,and the menu pedal again select it.

Flexi choose

When you have to choose from a potentially large number of possibilities (e.g. aliases in your address book) this lets you navigate down a tree of them in just a few steps, using either the pedals or voice.

Voice

Embedded Commands

Voice recognition typically seperates commands from dictated text by pauses around the commands. This package recognizes command phrases in continuous speech, removing them from the text as they are executed. A colour cue system warns you when what you are saying is being detected as a command phrase.

Language-guided editing

Editing by the sense of the text, that is, at a higher-level abstraction than usual, makes better use of bandwidth available. This became Languide, part of Versor.

Pedals for Emacs

Voice input for Emacs