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Comment by ploversteno | Hacker News Reader

Hot off the press: Please view my latest steno coding video, where I transcribe a somewhat longer snippet of Python from the Plover codebase!

http://youtu.be/jRFKZGWrmrM

I'm still just a Python novice, so obviously I didn't write this code originally; I'm just transcribing it from a text file into Vim to demonstrate how easily and fluently code can be written with steno. It's not primarily about speed, but about chunking commands and words into single strokes, as opposed to breaking them down into individual letters and typing each letter out one by one as in qwerty. Also notice how simple error correction is; an incorrect word is deleted with a single stroke.

For more information, visit: http://openstenoproject.org

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I really enjoyed watching the talk and the demos. I think there's huge opportunity in a Kickstarter here, both for the gamification aspect as well as the hardware. If I could get a kit with hardware and training it could be compelling. I imagine a setup with both qwerty and steno co-existing, instead of trying to force steno to cover all text input. I think I want to use each for what it's best at.

I think there's also an activism we could have about NKRO. I had never even heard of it before watching this. If it was a feature I knew actually helped people, I would expect it to be present. At the very least, it's not too much to ask to get this feature in cheaper boards.

But seriously, as a gift at the end of the year, I can see engineers getting this. It would actually be a pretty badass gift...

I've started to see these fully split keyboards, and it makes me think, could people handle a keyboard which had two different home positions with two different keysets?

I'm imagining a left hand / right hand split qwerty, but nestled in the middle is the smaller steno board. Maybe that's crazy, but whatever the right design, there have got to be hobbyists out there who would build the prototype which you could feature.

Is that the right path? Building some kind of uber keyboard and a cute training game and trying to do it all at once? That's endorsing an almost YC approach, but it would certainly be fun if you're into that pace.

Good luck with the project! I think captioning is important, but will ultimately be replaced by software; giving the world a better way to input text universally is a very big idea. I don't think it's necessarily great for programming in today's languages, but I guess you have to think about this sort of thing on a wider time scale.

I'm not trying to be negative in any way, because this is awesome. I really believe there are so many ways to interact with machines that we haven't figured out yet.

But ... can't you achieve this level of efficiency, maybe even better with a combination of auto completion and snippets?

With python and vim, I use jedi-vim[0] and neosnippet[1] for textmate compatible snippet completion.

0 : https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi-vim 1 : https://github.com/Shougo/neosnippet.vim

It would be cool to see a video demonstrating this using the same snippet of code! If you decide to make one, let me know, and I'll link it on the Plover blog.

Isn't a snippet basically just a chord that requires you to input the characters in sequence though?

Fascinating talk, thank you. I was curious, I saw it mentioned that stenographers have their own styles around the edges of the language.

Would it be possible to capture each users' idiosyncrasies, and work them in to the core to keep it expanding? (Perhaps using statistical analysis of shared chords?)

A goal could be to have the best of both worlds: flexibility to customize as one sees fit. Yet, also have the idiomatic ways bundled in. That way a user could minimize the amount of time spent tinkering, if they so wished.

I've thought about having a sort of collaborative dictionary, updated in realtime with entries weighted by how frequently people use them over a certain period of time. I'm not sure how practical it would actually turn out to be, but it's an interesting idea.

That video looks fantastic.

Thank you so much for working on this. Recently I've been experiencing significant repetitive stress. I am using a kinesis advantage keyboard and recently worked with a few physical therapists. I still feel pain.

I really like that by learning Plover, I may not only be reducing pain, but actually become a faster typer and coder. I just ordered a sidewinder keyboard, and I look forward to trying out this soon. I am prepared for a long learning curve, but by this point I am used to it and it seems like it will be worth the cost.

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