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Comment by whoisterencelee | Hacker News Reader

I developed a software demo (for single hand chording on the keyboard) that updates the character tree representation, possible outputs are shown as the chord sequence is formed. And the adjacent keys idea you have which I call "bigram rollover" works really well in this type of system, because you can tell what neighboring characters are.

The "bigram rollover" is key to reducing the number of key events, and the added bonus is that it should help ramp up the steep learning curve with getting the right sequence.

I am also investigating some sort of phonetic/bigram mapping system (maybe similar to the plover/stenotype system), seems it's the way to go, as shorthand seems to solve the main issue with chording which is high number of key events for a single output.

I am actually looking for help designing the mapping as explained above, it seems we have very similar ideas, perhaps we can collaborate?

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I tried many keyboards due to RSI but in the end I'm currently very happy with a kinesis advantage, which made me lose a lot of interest in chording keyboards.

In the end, there's nothing in stenotyping that you couldn't do with a regular keyboard. The advantage in stenotyping is not chording per-se (which is used to reduce the number of keys more than anything else), but the input/composition method, which is highly specialized for text (and english text at that).

There's no convenient way to compose arbitrary symbols in a stenotyping machine. In a regular keyboard there are just more keys and thus the requirement for key composition is almost zero (you still "chord" with shift/control/alt if you think about it). More keys = more immediate symbols. On my S90, which is a full-length keyboard, I only have 88 keys with a key travel length of 1.2m! By comparison, I have (more than) 104 keys in 40x20cm right now.

I agree, stenotype's advantage is not chording and I think our insight is similar; it's the phonetic shorthand which is breaking a word down into syllables which is always shorter than the number of characters (for English anyways).

I think of it as a readily available syllable->word database, which any chording mechanism can take advantage of.

You're right, arbitrary symbols is not stenotype's strength, but chording is somewhat, at least when number of key switches is limited and the whole keyboard size is really small.

I suppose the question is whether chording in a confined space is any better than a full size keyboard, because there is zero or less wrist movement and fingers do not need to reach out (no positional issues).

The answer to that question is yes, chording is better in a setting like mobile phones, which by the way is where we do most of our typing these days, so you shouldn't lose interest.

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