Not sure if this helps but i shifted to driving my computer via the keyboard as much as possible. After trying many tools over the years, here’s what’s stuck…
I run ubuntu as my OS with Regolith desktop.
I use neovim as my editor for anything text based - via the firenvim browser plugin for anvil.
My browser has the vimium plugin.
Also, that keyboard of mine (like many others) is fully programmable. Any key can be configured to do anything.
Most such keyboards have ‘virtual layers’ - a bit like having many different shift keys - and macros to send multiple key presses from a single key.
Look for a keyboard that supports qmk. The zsa keyboards use qmk but have their own software that adds a few bells and whistles.
If individual digits are painful, you can program the keyboard to minimise their use. Mine even comes with software to track that use and show it as a heat map.
Frozen shoulder is the only thing I have ever taken super-strong pain killers for. Very painful.
I split all my coding up into reusable classes, and I find Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet to be very good at producing the first draft, without cutting corners (like I sometime do). This limits my job to “tidying up”, which is sometimes not even necessary, and DJing it all together (a job that Claude can often do faster than I can).
It’s horses for courses. I find AI not so good at coding on broader scope jobs. I clearly define what goes in and what I expect out and under what conditions, often in bullet point form, and AI seems to get that. I also tend to brainstorm my ideas on a google doc (so I don’t lose it), and transferring that to an AI chat window is easy.
But the fine control required to build front ends - that’s another story.
I like the look of Regolith - not seen that before.
Must try that inside anvil. I remember when that was discussed before.
Regolith is excellent and I have some of its more awkward key combos programmed into my keyboard.
I’m sorry to hear about your difficulties. It’s very frustrating when such a problem affects your professional activity. To better manage the symptoms caused by arthritis, you could try medical cannabis. I know a clinic in the UK called Releaf, which specializes in medical cannabis treatments. The clinic delivers directly to your home and offers online consultations with specialized doctors. Just in case someone from UK reads this, here’s theirpage about arthritis medical cannabis treatment.
Hi @david.wylie
I’m sorry to hear you suffer from arthritis. I have relatives who also deal with it, and even my closest companion, Buddy, my dog, has it too. I truly feel for you and am sorry you’re going through this.
Although I don’t have much input regarding LLM and voice recognition (but i will look in to it), I would like to offer you my help with coding/mouse/keyboard intersive tasks if you need!!
Feel free to reach out and i will do my very best to try and help.
Sorry to hear that @david.wylie
I am not sure if I fully understand what the issue here is (and what causes or not causes it). However, last semester for my college project, I explored the idea of using hand gestures from webcam for user input.
My particular task was to detect what users are drawing in air and running it through an AI model to detect and correct shapes.
But perhaps, something like that can also be used for your case? Sounds complex but it isn’t too hard to detect the position of your fingers through a webcam and then using something like pyautogui to move the cursor based on it. Perhaps gestures like bringing two fingers together can be used for click? Mediapipe makes it really simple.
Just a stupid idea. But will that actually help with your problem?