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Also the most surprising part of doing this was seeing that abbreviating super short words like "the" -> "t" actually saves far more characters overall than abbreviating long words and phrases that are less common, like "what do you think" -> "wdytk".

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It would be interesting to see how much time you save.

I guess average typists will type "the" much faster than a complex word. Through muscle memory. I think it will be less noticeable for fast typists, who get their speed by being consistently fast.

I thought a bit about this... I feel like for me most of my slowdown comes from needing to get timing correct between my right and left hand. When I go too fast I start to get the letters in the wrong order, which isn't as much of a risk for letters all coming from the same hand (for me at least shrug)

I might go look for some research on typing times for different kinds of words beyond letter count!

I think you'd dig Ikcelaks Magic Sturdy layout, which has a dedicated Adaptive Key (ie. morphing based on your last keypress, while fitting in with the overall layout by keeping finger usage and comfortable motions in mind). I mention it here because it expands to "the" if your last "letter" was space.

https://github.com/Ikcelaks/keyboard_layouts/blob/main/magic...

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