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https://github.com/eschluntz/compress
Text compression for generating keyboard expansions
https://github.com/eschluntz/compress
Last synced: about 2 months ago
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Text compression for generating keyboard expansions
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/eschluntz/compress
- Owner: eschluntz
- Created: 2021-10-10T01:56:19.000Z (almost 3 years ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2023-09-30T17:24:33.000Z (12 months ago)
- Last Synced: 2024-06-08T09:36:27.258Z (3 months ago)
- Language: Python
- Size: 848 KB
- Stars: 1,406
- Watchers: 11
- Forks: 28
- Open Issues: 3
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Metadata Files:
- Readme: readme.md
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- my-awesome-github-stars - eschluntz/compress - Text compression for generating keyboard expansions (Python)
README
[](https://codecov.io/gh/eschluntz/compress)
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# Compress
This is a tool for automatically creating typing shortcuts from a corpus of your own writing! I use these shortcuts mainly for email and slack:
This repo parses a corpus of text and suggest what shortcuts you should use to save the most letters while typing. It then generates config files for [Autokey](https://github.com/autokey/autokey), a linux program that implements keyboard shortcuts!
It also contains a tool for optionally parsing a Slack Data Export of your messages to create a corpus.
# What phrases should I abbreviate?
The code looks through the corpus to find common n-grams that can be replaced with much shorter phrases. The suggestions are ranked by `[characters saved] * [frequency of phrase]`.
I was surprised that very short and frequent words topped this list, such as `the -> t`, instead of longer phrases that I use a lot, such as `what do you think -> wdytk`.
Just reading through the results was amusing to see how repetitive some of my writing is :)
# How to pick abbreviations?
This is largely preferences and heuristics to try to generate memorable abbreviations for different phrases. Some of my design philosphies were:
1. The abbrev cannot be a word that I want to type. Right now this is done with a blacklist, but I should change it to use my actual corpus.
2. The goal is being memorable. 1st letter is top choice, and 1st letter + last letter is next choice.
3. More common phrases get priority for more memorable abbrevs.
This is currently done as a manual post-process step, but I like to make "families"
of abbrevs to make them more memorable. Some example heuristics for this are:
1. Plurals should have the same abbrev as the singular, but with an "s". For example `robot -> r` and `robots -> rs`.
2. If a word has an abbrev, a phrase that contains that word should contain the abbrev. For example:
```
the -> t
robot -> r
the robot -> tr
```
3. Think about how similar words' abbrevs can be similar as well. i.e.
```
some -> s
someone -> sn
something -> st
sometime -> sti
```
# Instructions
1. run `install.sh` to install dependencies. Currently tested on python 3.10.12
1. Put any corpus of your text that you want to compress in `data/corpus/*.txt`
2. If you want to use your slack history as a corpus:
1. export it to a folder called `data/slack_export`. Only slack workspace admins can do this (and it only exports public channels).
2. Change `USERNAME_TO_EXPORT` at the top of the file to your slack username.
3. Run `parse_slack.py`. This will generate a new corpus document in `data/corpus/`
4. DELETE YOUR SLACK EXPORT WITH `srm`
3. Run `find_suggested_phrases.py`. This will generate a list of the top 200 suggested shortcuts to `output/suggested_shortcuts.yaml`
4. Edit or add any shortcuts that you want, then copy the file to `shortcuts.yaml`.
- This is a manual step so you can customize it without it being blown out every time you run the script again.
- It's also saved in git even though it's an output so that I can keep it in sync across multiple of my computers :)
- If you're starting out, I suggest just going with 10-20 shortcuts to make it easier to remember them
5. Run `generate_autokeys.py` to convert `shortcuts.yaml` into actual config files for `autokey`.
6. Install [Autokey](https://github.com/autokey/autokey)
- Right now, Autokey is only supported on linux with X11, not Wayland
7. Check that your autokey config is located at `~/.config/autokey/data/My Phrases/`. If it is somewhere else, change `reload.sh:8` to point to your config location
8. From now on when you edit `shortcuts.yaml` you can re-generate and reload autokey with `reload.sh`
# Notes
[Autokey](https://github.com/autokey/autokey) Uses simulated keyboard input to replace phrases with your abbreviations. I tried several chrome extensions but this worked much more reliably without conflicting with sites' own javascript.
The config files I generate are set to only apply when Chrome is in focus because that's where I do most of my english typing. I found that keeping this active in terminal and vscode caused way more problems than it was solved because my abbreviations overlapped with common short linux commands and variable names i.e. `t`.