Probably better for r/showerthoughts - but is anyone using emacs without a keyboard?
I assume the core audience of emacs is devs and sysadmins (and perhaps academics with org and org roam)
But surely somebody somewhere is doing those jobs / using assistive tech (dragon etc?) to interface with emacs?
Is there something specific that people may use emacs in that situation?
I imagine it is as easy to interface with as any other piece of software that people need to use assisted. If your question is could it be better than other pieces of software I suppose it could be made to be so.
I think it’d be really cool to implement a swipe-based touch interface onto Emacs. The recent Android port has potential as they’re fixing up touchscreen support. The real question is, how do you make such a thing intuitive and ergonomic?
M-x strokes-help
Can you link to info about enhanced touchscreen support?
Emacs has been ahead of the curve on that one for a long time with emacsspeak
That was my first thought, but isn’t this text-to-speech? That would be emacs without screen, not emacs without keyboard.
I think remember a post on hacker news (not that I could find it again), about a dev who was losing his sight and managed to configure emacs for his needs because it’s the most flexible editor.
Quick googling turns up emacspeak and speechd-el
For a long while, when RMS had severe tendonitis in his hands and wrists, he had a succession of volunteers who typed for him, and he would literally say things to them like “C-f C-f C-k C-p C-a C-y” for hours on end while he worked. They were human voice recognition systems.
Ahh, so his tendonitis treatment was to transfer his tendonitis to unsuspecting fans? I always suspected Emacs was some sort of witchcraft.
Does he describe this on his site anywhere?
I use AudioPen which is a speech to text app. I then copy and paste to Emacs. Obviously, there is some keyboard activity, but not as much as when I have typed everything.
I kind of do. I use exwm and guix on my Steam Deck, so I mapped the controls to execute certain key sequences, so that I can launch games, mount & unmount sdcards, switch back and forth from fullscreen, change fsr quality, etc. But I don’t use emacs in a standard way in this case, so I’m effectively not using emacs for doing anything text related.