Use Case Description

Thanks to Blabby, I've begun using voice as my main form of typing.

This has been a very significant change!

One of the first things that I wanted to figure out was how to make it convenient to actually start and stop my voice recordings.

Of course one can just reach for the toolbar on the screen but eventually this becomes a bit challenging especially when working on documents when you don't want to have to leave your cursor position to hit the toolbar

The first hardware that I implemented was a custom USB button a bit like this (

I figured that the standard way to “talk” in places like control room settings is a push to talk button but USB support for those is not really a thing!)

I then had to figure out what's the best way to bind this as a shortcut.

The strategy that I used was to bind it to F13 which is recognized on most operating systems but not present on most keyboards or built into most shortcuts.

I figured it was a good choice for creating a key binding that wouldn't conflict and so far it's worked out.

Secondary Shortcuts

After doing this for a few months, I began to think that it would actually be helpful to have not just one way of starting and stopping dictation, but a few methods, all within easy reach.

So I added a second shortcut which was binding a button on my mouse to F13 which in turn binds to Blabby

Tertiary Keybinding / Shortcut!

The icing on the cake from my perspective would be to also have a button on my keyboard.

The only issue is that:

1) It doesn’t have a key for F13

2) I could remap a key I don’t use (say the mute button) onto F13 but …

Doing these kind of things on Linux, in my experience, always ends up being way more complicated than you expect.

What Would Be A Good Solution

the ability to map multiple shortcut keys in Blabby so that one didn't have to just use a single key button for their shortcut and could bind it to a few different macro keys to support different hardware devices as I've described above.