Learning Talon’s magic words for navigating around on the Windows operating system.

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Navigating Around the Windows Operating System

One of the first things I wanted to learn when I started Talon was how to get around on my computer.

Launching Applications

Once I am logged into my account on Windows, I will want to boot up some apps.

The way I start up most of my programs is with the launch command. For example, what I want to launch Internet Explorer, I say the command: launch internet explorer

This opens Internet Explorer.

The launch keyword doesn’t always work for a variety of reasons. When it doesn’t work, I fall back on the keyboard shortcuts.

In the lower left hand corner of the screen, Windows has a search bar. This search bar can be used to find and launch programs. The keyboard shortcut to put focus on the search bar is Windows + S. The Talon voice control command for this is: super sun

This voice command seemed rather arbitrary to me, but there is a reason for the names. Different operating systems have different unique key names. Windows has the ‘windows’ key, mac has the ‘apple’ key, and I’m not sure about linux: but talon calls all of these keys the ‘super’ key. On the Windows operating system, in order to get Talon to press the Windows key, I say ‘super.’ Saying ‘super sun’ results in pressing the keyboard short cut Windows-S, which puts the cursor in the windows search bar.

Now that my cursor is in the search bar, I can start writing out the name of my program letter by letter using the Talon phonetic alphabet.

I start out spelling ‘int’ with the commands “sit near trap”

At this point, the Windows autocomplete feature will probably have brought up Internet Explorer as the first or second search result. If the Internet Explorer result is highlighted, I can say ‘enter’ and Internet Explorer will launch.

If the Internet Explorer result is the second or third option, I can use the arrow keys (go up, go down, go left, go right) or the tab key (tab) to navigate through the search options.

And that is how I open programs in Windows.

Switching Between Windows Using the Task Switcher

One thing I also wanted to learn early on was how to switch between open Windows.

While knausj-talon has some window-switching capability, it isn’t really that great on Windows.

Windows has several native ways of switching apps. My preferred method is with the ctrl-alt-tab windows switcher. The ctrl-alt-tab windows switcher is a refinement of the alt tab windows switcher, except instead of requiring me to hold down the alt key while I am switching windows, it leaves the window switcher open after I press ctrl-alt-tab.

To open it with Talon, I say control alt tab

That opens the Windows window switcher. To select the window I want, I use the arrow key commands, which are go down, go up, go left, go right

And to select the window I want, I use the ‘enter’ key with the command enter

For most of my work, the alt-tab windows switcher is sufficient.

Switching Between Windows using the Task View

The task view on Windows is it far more powerful and comprehensive list of programs and files I’ve been working with. To open it, I use the keyboard shortcut Windows tab.

The voice command for that is super tab

After that I navigate around with the arrow keys to find the window I am looking for, and when I find it, I press enter. The commands for navigateing with the arrow keys are: go down, go up, go left, go right

To select something, I say ‘enter, and to leave without selecting anything, I say ‘escape.’

And the command for selecting a window is enter

The biggest and best feature of the Task View Window is that it keeps a month-long history of all the files I worked with. As a result, it makes it fairly simple to go back and find and reopen old projects.

Switching Between Windows Using Talon

The knausj-talon script set does not currently have a very good way of switching between windows. It is possible to use the ‘focus’ command to switch between programs, but if you have more than one window of the same program open, it will choose only one of those windows and ignore the rest. However, if you want to try the commands, they are: “focus firefox” or “focus notepad”

Saying the focus command will focus on whatever program you say, but only on the first window of each program.

As a result, using the ctrl-alt-tab window switcher shortcut is far more reliable.

Switching Between Tabs and Tabbed Applications

Many applications that I use a lot, like the Internet Explorer browser, have tabs. In order to switch between tabs, I use the keyboard short cut ‘control tab’

This takes me to the next tab. If I want to go back to the previous tab, I can say ‘shift control tab’ and it will take me backwards.

Arranging Windows Using Knausj-Talons ‘snap’ commands.

Knausj_talon’s snap commands are, in my opinion, a superior way to snap windows, because the snap commands always work the way I expect. For example, if I say ‘snap internet explorer left” it will snap the internet explorer window to the left half of the screen. And if I say ‘snap right’ wit will snap whatever window I have selected to the right half of the screen.

Talon, Or rather, the knausj_talon script set, has a much better built-in way of snapping windows. Knausj_talon has 25 knausj_talon snap positions that you can snap windows, and there isn’t a way to look them up short of looking at them on line 119 of file window_snap.py in the knausj talon source code.

I personally use only five of them of them. “snap left” “snap right” “snap top” “snap bottom” “snap fullscreen”

Arranging Windows Using Window 10’s Built In Keyboard Shortcuts

There is a built-in way of doing this with the windows operating system, and it is worse than the knausj-talon one.

First, I’m going to discuss the built-in Windows way of doing this. On the Windows operating system is a little bit complicated because the same keyboard short cut will do different things depending on the state of the window. This is because the keyboard shortcut to control window snapping is a toggle which cycles through a list of three options, instead of a keyboard shortcut that does exactly the same thing every time.

For example, let’s say I pressed the keyboard shortcut “windows left.” The Talon voice command for that is: super left

If the window is unsnapped, that will snapped the window to the left half of the screen. If the window is snapped, it will unsnap the window and cycle through three combinations: left, unsnapped, and right. My technique for getting the window to snap where I want it to snap is to keep hitting the keyboard shortcut “windows left” until it ends up on the left half of the screen.

This is confusing since the same keypress does four diferent things.

If I have multiple monitors, passing this keyboard combination will also cycle through the monitors.

In other words, if it doesn’t do what I want initially, I can press this repeatedly until I get to where I do want it.

I find this annoying.

Sometimes when I have more than one window open and I’ve snapped a window to the left side of the screen, on the right side it pops up a menu of other open apps.

If I choose one of the open apps with the enter key, it will make my selected window fill the other half of the screen.

Minimizing and Maximizing Windows

The shortcut I use most commonly is ‘minimize all windows’, which I can do with the command “super drum” to press the keyboard shortcut ‘windows d’

Then I use ‘ctrl-alt-tab’ to maximize the apps I want to work with again.