How to dictate a CONSTANT_CASE name for an environment variable

Say “constant case”, “screaming snake case” or “scream case” followed by the words, and VoiceGem uppercases each one and joins them with underscores: “constant case max retry count” returns MAX_RETRY_COUNT. Three phrasings reach this style, more than any other casing command, because the style itself has three common names.

A nine-word environment declaration costs about 10 seconds on the keyboard against about 3.3 seconds aloud. (sources: Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson & Oulasvirta, “Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes”, CHI 2018, 168,000 participants, 136 million keystrokes; Yuan, Liberman & Cieri, “Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation”, Interspeech 2006, 2,438 American English telephone conversations (Switchboard corpus). The speech figure is conversational rate, not a measured dictation rate — no such measurement exists.)

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Step by step

1
Pick one of the three phrasings
Say “scream case” if you want the shortest. All three phrases reach the same style, and VoiceGem matches the three-word form first because the table is walked longest-first.
2
Say the words of the name
Speak each word separately. The command uppercases every word and joins the run with underscores.
3
Use a fresh command for each constant
Say the phrase again after a comma. A casing run ends at any symbol, so a second constant on the same line needs its own command.
4
The keyboard route
Turn on caps lock and type the underscores. It is the one naming convention where a keyboard has a dedicated mode, which makes it more competitive with dictation than the others.

Three phrasings reach constant case and none of the other styles has more than one

Alias counts across VoiceGem's five casing styles are uneven for the same reason they are uneven across the symbols: they track what people actually say. Camel, pascal, snake and kebab each have one phrase because each has one common name, while this style is variously called constant case, screaming snake case and scream case depending on who taught it to you.

Longest-first matching is what lets a three-word phrase coexist with a two-word one. The Deterministic Pass tries three words, then two, then one at every position, so “screaming snake case” is consumed whole rather than being read as the word screaming followed by a snake case command.

Where the manual way breaks

Caps lock plus underscores is a genuinely efficient way to type a constant, and this is the naming convention where the keyboard competes best. Anyone comfortable with caps lock should keep using it.

Configuration blocks are where speaking helps. A file of a dozen environment constants is a dozen uppercase names with two or three underscores each, and toggling caps lock repeatedly is the part people get wrong. Dictating the block in VoiceGem means one command per constant and no mode to remember.

Doing this somewhere else? the same casing converter this demo runs, the camel case command specifically, what changes for the kebab case command, or the pascal case command specifically.

Common questions

“Scream case” is two words and reaches the same style as the other two. All three produce identical output in VoiceGem.

VoiceGem matches the table longest-first, trying three words before two. The three-word phrase is consumed whole before the two-word one is considered.

Say the command again after the comma. A casing run stops at any symbol, so the second name needs its own command.

Turn a list of settings names into constants in one paste.

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