What is Reddit's opinion of Dasher?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/MoreScreen.html

This thing might give you a seizure, or you might really like it. If you're savvy, you can train or modify it to use an alphabet of LaTeX or math symbols.

That typing interface has been around for many years—it's available for free online, and I remember trying it out for fun when I was younger. ~~The name of it is eluding my memory, though~~ It's called Dasher. It can be fun to just randomly steer it around and see what it comes out with, much like modern predictive smartphone keyboards, since it incorporates an element of learning from you as you use it (IIRC).

Since I just mentioned it elsewhere (and it's still in my clipboard :D), this might be applicable to this thread as well. That said, this looks kinda neat! Thanks for sharing!

If heat helps your pain and your neck is your main problem you might go for one of these bed buddy things. It's annoying to have to re-nuke it when it cools off but it's helpful. I have bad neck pain too. In fact my pain in general started with my neck.

As for hand and arm pain I mentioned this program in another post but it will slow you down even after you get good at using it.

Oh, and I find that a heating pad resting on the arm/hand helps.

Yeah, well, sometimes I use a computer where I don't really have the keyboard within reach and then I use gedit sort of like a glorified clipboard and maybe use dasher to type with the mouse. That's something that doesn't really mix with vi. Vi is for people who have a keyboard and know how to use it. If you can't or don't know how to type properly, then vi is probably not the editor to use.

But if you have a keyboard within reach, then yes, vi is superb.

Very good feedback, specially becuase the other ones are more like "instructions" of how to use search operators.

The words you use are important, and sometimes you really have to "browse around" circling through a set of pages as you get closer to your desired result.

For example some time ago I was looking for Dasher, a project I have used like 10 years ago, but I did not remember the name. The problem is how do you describe it to Google?

I searched terms like:

• keyboard follow sight
• open source software write with mouse
• sight tracking write open source

Among similar others, with the little information I had... of course almost nothing came up. Until I started going to Google Images looking for the familiar boxes screen that I remembered. Fortunately, I found one image that had what looked similar to what I rememberd. The page was for some sight-tracking hardware that said that it was compatible with "Dasher". Once I plugged the name in Google, I ended my search.

Nuance is the software company behind Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the premier voice recognition dictation software. They are definitely the hundred pound gorilla in the market, although I do not know if they have any iOS offerings.

You could also look into Dasher, a piece of predictive typing software meant for special needs. I don't think it's available on iOS, but there does look to be a stable version available for Mac desktops (OS X).

As far as I can tell, an Input Method Editor is a way to input a language that uses characters not on a standard keyboard. All of the letters you need for English are already on a standard keyboard, so there's typically no need for an IME.

Spell-correction is usually left to individual applications, because it would be AAF (annoying as fuck) to have the OS "correcting" the spelling of command-line inputs like "umount", or any sort of code in general.

Text prediction is generally considered to be more cumbersome than simply typing out the word, if you're working on a full-size keyboard that has all the characters you'll need for the language you're working in.

If you don't have a full-size keyboard, or can't use the one you have, there are software packages like Dasher.

I don't know if one would necessarily type better with these keyboards but they are rather non-standard: Dasher, Flit Keyboard, Slice Keyboard.

Link me: Flit Keyboard, Slice Keyboard

Try this ugly program while your fingers nimble themselves up: Dasher.

Also, congratulations on the updated diagnosis: if the nerves grow back you have a hell of a story and severe respect for a lot of stuff I guess :)

You know dasher? It takes the statistics of natural language into account and makes input lightning fast. I think this is the way to go for man-machine communication. Maybe you could incorporate this idea.

How about two things?

Guilty by Gravity Kills. The St. Louis station The Point was playing it in heavy rotation for ages, it disappeared for a while, then all of a sudden it was in heavy rotation again, because it was a hit. I was sick of it by the time it was a hit. :->

And I remember sitting on an IRC channel years ago and while I don't know who posted it, but someone who was working on this weird thing called Dasher asked people to try it out. Somewhat predictably, it's also an Android keyboard

EDIT: Was a big fan of Marty Friedman before he was ever in Megadeth. Damn, that happened 24 years ago...