Re: no joy...

[Michael Torrie <torriem gmail com>]

On 12/22/2011 03:46 PM, Gary Kline wrote:
>       abbrevs.  iFWIW,  my last brain op messed up my entire rt
>       side and because my left hand wasn't that good, i type only
>       around 20wpm.  by learning only 130 or abbrvs, you can gain
>       roughly 30%.   so imagine some poor kid [[[ OR woman--or,
>       for that matter, anybody who has a driving goal to learn and
>       to *communicate*]]]:: there are roughly 100million with some
>       kind of physical disability.  

I now understand why you want to use something like gvim.  I presume
your abbreviation system is done through .vimrc macros?  Please tell me
more how you accomplish this.

>       typing on an editor like vi/gvim that has builtin
>       abbreviations means fewer keystrokes.

>       that's what gvim does.  my default filename is 'talk.[N].txt.
>       after i've typed "[qesc]:x[enter]"  espeak -f <file> reads     
>       it and opens "talk.[N+1]txt" and wait for keybd input.
>
>       but say that somebody want to hear what i said several
>       minutes before.  i heave to search all my *txt files to find
>       the one he wants.  thed display button will bring up 500, 500 
>       windows.  i need buttons on the popped window.  or window.
>       One window:  buttons like [prev], [nrxt], [speak] [qauit
>       window].  

Hmm.  This is going to be very hard to do with GTK+ (or any other UI
toolkit for that matter).  You are trying to drive a full blown
graphical app in its own right with your graphical app.

You could re-implement the abbreviations things you use in vim with a
standard TextView editor widget in GTK+.  You could do this two ways.
Either intercept keystrokes and fill in the full word (easy to do in
TextView), or just keep everything abbreviated and then expand the
abbreviations when sending the output to espeak.

Or you could try to implement your needs as native vim code.  Use Gvim's
facilities rather than try to hack your own in GTK+ and try to get them
to work with Gvim.

I'm coming back to my original suggestion.  Instead of running gvim,
could you just run straight vim in a VTE GTK+ widget?   I presume your
abbreviations are all defined in .vimrc.  This way it at least integrate
with your GTK+ code.  That's really the only way you're going to get it
to work even close to the way you describe.

I might hack together something here over the holidays.  It will be in
python, but maybe it will help.  You might want to try a bit of python.
 There are way less non-alphanumeric characters than in C, so it would
be easier for you to type.  Structure is done with spaces instead of
curly braces.

> > Okay so you are trying to come up with a graphical program whereby you
> > can type something (say in a text box) and have espeak speak it so that
> > others can hear and understand you?  Do I have this right?
>
>
>       i think so; it isn't rocket science ...  i'll send you the
>       code with the gcc line if you 'd like.  

Feel free to post GTK+ code here to this list and we can look it over a bit.

I'm starting to get a feel for what you are trying to accomplish.  I am
glad you remain able to communicate fairly well through the written word.

Michael