There have been a bunch of posts lately about writing (or Inking) code.
I tried the OrangeGuava Developer Input Panel but found it to be clunky and slower than the SP2 TIP. I couldn't work out if I was meant to write whole words or single characters over the panes. Characters are fine, but letter by letter seems much too slow. Whole words 'sometimes' work, and other times end up being output multiple times in different variations (this must be a bug).
Given my last rant, I can't but not mention the fact that it writes to keys in the machine section of the registry (meaning it won't run in a non-administrator context). This makes the program completely useless to me. But it's not all bad, the ability to ink over the control key is absolutely brilliant. If I had a control key with this functionality on the SP2 TIP I'd be flying.
Which is not to say that I'm not flying already. Following the recent tradition - here's a video (1:33s) of my technique for Inking hello world in C#. For comparison here's the typed version (19s). If we use these as a guide, then I can ink code at about 1/5th the speed that I type it. I think the video shows that it's not semicolons, braces, brackets, tabs or new lines slowing me down, it's just the overall concept that writing takes longer than typing. Still, it feels fast enough to me. But I really do need to sit down and Ink an entire application before I can say this for sure.
I have no doubt that it is possible and that someone will write an excellent IDE-integrated input panel for developers. However for the time being, I'm more than happy* with the SP2 TIP.
* Assuming I can work out how to get the TIP to not vanish after inserting text into Visual Studio.
