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Troubleshooting

Here is a list of common issues you might encounter, along with possible solutions:

Typing a letter after a command without a mark​

Due to the way that Cursorless allows you to omit marks (eg "take funk" instead of "take funk this"), the grammar can be slightly ambiguous to parse. The most common example will be if you omit the mark (eg "change funk"), and then try to type a letter ("air"). In that case, when you say "change funk air", Talon will parse it as a single command to change the function with a gray hat over an a, which is usually what you mean. However, if you did want to change the function containing the cursor, and then type "a", then the parse will be incorrect. To work around this limitation, there are a few options:

  • Option 1: pause after "change funk" so that it is broken into two separate command phrases "change funk", then "air"
  • Option 2: say "change funk this air" instead, so that you make the mark explicit
  • Option 3: add the command then: skip() to a Talon file, which makes a command called "then" that does nothing, but can be used to break up the command phrase. Then you can say "change funk then air"

"red"​

A similar ambiguity can arise if you use the default color name for red and the default letter name for r defined in community, both of which are "red". In this case, if you say "change red air", it could be interpreted as either of the following:

  • "change red" (referring to token with a gray hat over r), followed by "air" (to type the letter a), or
  • "change red air" (referring to the red hat over an a).

Most of the time you’ll mean the latter, and that is how Talon will interpret the command. But occasionally you’ll want the former. As above, you have a few options:

  • Option 1: pause after "change red" so that it is broken into two separate command phrases "change red", then "air"
  • Option 2: change r to be eg "risk" or "ram" in your Talon alphabet to avoid the conflict
  • Option 3: map a then: skip() command as above. Then when you actually want the first behaviour, you’ll say "change red then air"

When a variable is grayed out, the red hat looks pink​

When you have an unused variable, VS Code will make it semi-transparent. Unfortunately, this transparency also applies to any Cursorless hats over the variable, so if you are using a light background, then any red hat on the variable will be blended with the light background and look pink. We have filed an issue with VS Code to fix this one, but it might be a while.

In the meantime, your best bet is probably to disable the pink hat and instead enable userColor1, which has a default voice command of "navy". To do so, search for cursorless.hatEnablement.colors in your VS Code settings, and uncheck the box next to pink and check the one next to userColor1. Then when you pull up the cheatsheet you should see that "pink" has been replaced by "navy", and a new navy hat color should show up in your editor instead of pink.

Decorations don't scale with editor zoom​

There are two relevant types of zoom actions in VS Code.

  • workbench.action.zoomIn scales all UI. Cursorless deals with this as expected.
  • editor.action.fontZoomIn scales only the editor font. This will trigger the issue. This action does not have a keybinding by default. Ctrl + mouse wheel also triggers it when the editor.mouseWheelZoom setting is enabled.

To avoid the issue, use workbench.action.zoomIn to zoom the entire UI instead of changing only the editor font size.