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Aliases

Preferences in this page

  • autocorrect triggers on dash
  • space/backspace act as triggers only
    • meaning the keys "aa " result in "à" and not "à "

An Alias in Stuck is a series of characters that will be automatically turned into what it was defined as an alias of on hitting one of the following keys:

  • Space
  • Enter
  • Punctuation
    • it can be specific to languages which means this needs to be taken into account when implementing a new language.
    • French for instance has spaces before punctuation marks except commas and periods.
    • I guess an option to also trigger on dash would be adequate as well.

Note

"Implementing" a new language means this (so far):

  • interface translation,
  • aliasing rules,
  • dictionary availability

and it would benefit from having its own page (I guess "contributions"?)

In all cases, backspacing on the character that validated the mutation will cancel it. It won't be validated again unless the "word" is mutated.

Example

When I started writing I was writing in French on a QWERTY which means I didn't have any accent. One word for which it was really irritating was "à". I used Word, which has an autocorrect feature so I had "aa" turn to "à". In Stuck, here what that would look like:

  • I write "aa"
  • on space ("aa ") it turns into "à "
  • backspace results in "aa"
    • space results in "aa "
    • but backspace + "a" + space results in "à " again

Em-dash

By default "--" is configured to be an alias of em-dashes and will behave exactly this way.

Regarding punctuation, here's what this means:

  • If you define an alias that includes punctuation, the punctuation will be taken as part of it
  • But if you make another alias without the punctuation, the punctuation trigger it
  • Then you'd have to go back to cancel, rewrite the punctuation which won't trigger it this time
  • Then you can add space or punctuation which will trigger the one with the punctuation

Info

I won't pretend that this isn't very much targetting languages using a latin-adjacent alphabet or that behave similarly. It's not that I want to be excluding anyone, it's just that Stuck is about removing friction and for languages that are too different, I genuinely don't know what is relevant, what works well, what's needed, etc. I truly have no idea what the workflow of a Chinese or Arabic writer is. I'm not even sure whether Chinese writers nowadays mostly write in Pinyin or not, and I just think that baking in assumptions about what people need is exactly how we got to the current writing software industry.

Stuck is appropriate because it answers to my needs; and in doing so it answers to the needs of many people.