Dear Mr. Wagman, About 10 years ago I experienced some real difficulties with my hands. At that time, I tried to use my computer, including coding, by means of voice commands, but it didn't work well for me. It is possible that voice-control software have improved since that time, I cannot know.
My computer runs on Windows, not on Linux, so I am not sure whether the following suggestions would work on Linux. Years ago, there were two resources that helped me quite a lot to decrease the use of my hands: 1. I found that the single most aggressive movement to my hands was the mouse click. So, I started to use the mouse only for positioning the cursor on the screen, but the "click" was performed by means of a foot switch (a pedal). This, below, is the one that I have used for many years, USA made, really sturdy, advertised as Windows and Mac OS compatible, sold in USB versions with either 1, 2 or 3 pedals, each pedal can be programmed to act as we wish: [At the manufacturer] Savant Elite2 Dual Pedal https://kinesis-ergo.com/shop/savant-elite2-dual-pedal/ [At Amazon] Kinesis Savant Elite2 Programmable USB Foot Switch with 1, 2 or 3 Pedals https://www.amazon.com/Kinesis-Savant-Elite2-Programmable-FP20A/dp/B00QYRTTHI 2. To write, I have used (much less now, but very often at the peak of my hand impairment) the software Dasher, a tree-like way of writing any character on the screen, whether letters, numbers or punctuation characters. This was originally developed by Prof. David MacKay at Cambridge University in the UK, and is a free software. It has a learning curve, but it does work. It allows us to write without any mouse click, just by continuously positioning the cursor on the screen. The last working version of Dasher is Dasher 5.0 beta, at the address below (on that page, it is said that Linux users must compile from source code): https://github.com/dasher-project/dasher/releases A version 6 of Dasher seems to be under development, but I think it actually has not been released yet. On YouTube, you can get a feeling about how Dasher works. The first video is a one-hour-long 2007 Google Tech Talk by Prof. MacKay himself, explaining the concepts behind Dasher. The other two videos are well shorter, just demonstrations of the software. Dasher: information-efficient text entry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie9Se7FneXE Ada Majorek Introduction - CSUN Dasher https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvsSrClBwPM Dasher alternative input software - review and how to use https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z7fr4pZhmQ Please note: (1) At least on Windows, Dasher can send its output (the written text) directly to any other active window, so you could write directly to your text editor, word processor or web browser. (2) You will notice in the videos that, as the writing progresses, whole words appear on the Dasher screen, which can very much facilitate the writing of text. Dasher uses a background file of saved text (anything, like pieces of newspaper news, etc.), and we can add our own "dictionaries" to that backgroud file, anything we wish, anything that seems to be frequently used, like our own name or home address. In my case, I have added to that background file the most common R functions, a lot of them, like log, sqrt, data.frame, read.table, glm, and so on, and also functions used by some R packages, and other pieces of R code frequently used; this really makes it easier the writing of some R code. (3) Dasher allows one to write in many different languages, not only English, as there exist background files (each with the proper "dictionary") in really many languages. In the Dasher settings, we can define which will be the background file of our choice. I hope this will be of interest to you. Best regards, Paulo Barata Rio de Janeiro - Brazil ------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1 Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2026 15:14:50 -0800 From: Barnet Wagman<[email protected]> To:[email protected] Subject: [R] Voice coding R? Message-ID:<[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed" Is anyone using voice coding to work with R? I need to give my hands a rest and would like to hear anyone's experience. I'm currently using Rstudio but could change IDE if necessary. I'd strongly prefer tools that work under Linux. More specifically, Serenade seems like a possible solution. It does not support Rstudio directly but does support VS Code, which is supposed to support R. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks
______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide https://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
