@hesreallyhim feel free to chime in here, I know you have an implementation though it's slightly different

Let's continue to get votes and feedback on this, as well as other thing's people might want so we can build an overall list and big picture.

@craigglennie so yeah i'm polishing up a branch on my fork where i've wired up a "System Commands" feature where you set a special trigger word/prefix, and then you can declare mappings from words to keyboard/system actions (Enter, Space, Newline, Paste, Undo, etc.). So e.g. if my prefix is "exec" I can say "Let's create a new line here exec newline and now we're on a new line." and it will print:

Let's create a new line here
and now we're on a new line.

So the <prefix> + <keyword> temporarily "exits" the transcription and simulates a keyboard action.

I designed it as "System Commands" with the idea of OS-neutral commands, as in the actions are named semantically and not by actual keyboard key. But it uses the "enigo" library, and it looks like it's basically doing keyboard simulations with OS-detection (Codex wrote the implementation, so I'm reading through that part now). So there's definitely a lot of crossover between this and what you're suggesting.

This is what the UI looks like currently:

So one idea that leaps out is to extend this UI so that you can add mappings and then design it (either based on two different trigger words or in the config (or both)) so that e.g. "install dev" maps to "npm install --save-dev" and then I can choose to either TRANSCRIBE the mapped phrase or EXECUTE the mapped phrase (maybe i have a "handy-print" and a "handy-run" prefix e.g.), since all of my "system commands" are really "under-the-hood" calls to keystrokes anyway.

I chatted a little with Codex about this (Codex wrote the implementation) and I think we can design something that is a medium-complexity enhancement of what I built (which Codex wrote in just two days). So actually I think it's a very cool idea, and very doable. There are still a few "quirks" in my implementation that I would want to iron out first, and maybe "ship" some version of what I built first, but I would definitely see the possibility of adding this as an enhancement to what I wrote, and something I would also find useful and cool.

Doable with #930

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys

text = sys.stdin.read()

# Command expansions and emoji shortcuts
replacements = {
    # Commands
    "run unit tests": "pnpm run tests",
    "run tests": "pnpm run tests",
    "run dev": "pnpm run dev",
    "run build": "pnpm run build",
    "git status": "git status",
    "git commit": "git commit",
    # Emojis
    "grin emoji": ":grin:",
    "smile emoji": ":smile:",
    "thumbs up emoji": ":thumbsup:",
    "heart emoji": ":heart:",
    "fire emoji": ":fire:",
    "rocket emoji": ":rocket:",
    "eyes emoji": ":eyes:",
    "party emoji": ":tada:",
}

# Strip punctuation for lookup
lookup_text = text.strip().lower().rstrip('.,!?;:')
sys.stdout.write(replacements.get(lookup_text, text))