Dasher: information-efficient text entry

Why HN readers recommended it

Regarded as the seminal talk on Dasher, recommended in threads on accessible and alternative text input.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Google TechTalks

Topic

text entry interfaces

Format

talk

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

2

HN mentions in dataset

7

Recommendation years in dataset

2016–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• Dasher is fantastic, because it's based on rock solid information theory, designed by the late David MacKay. Here is the seminal Google Tech Talk about it: [VIDEO] Here is a demo of using Dasher by an engineer at Google, Ada Majorek, who has ALS and …

• I love David MacKay's brilliant work on the Dasher text input system, which draws deeply from his work on information theory -- imagine Dasher integrated with an IDE and code search and Copilot and language model! "Writing is navigating in the library of all possible …

• This is really awesome. It looks hard, but it isn't. Here's a talk from 2007 that explains it well [VIDEO]