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Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?

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Re: Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?

#51

Post by Clubber »

kadoban wrote: post #10
mchannon wrote: post #8

I can already type on a QWERTY keyboard way faster than I can think. That's one reason I haven't adopted a Dvorak habit. Most court reporters use software nowadays that renders their special stenotype skills obsolete.

Dvorak is much more comfortable than qwerty, in my opinion. I never actually cared about speed, it just feels better.

Dvorak keyboard's fatal flaw is when you have to type on someone else's keyboard. Standardization has its benefits, even if less than ideal. Trackballs have a similar issue.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?

#52

Post by jjmarr »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #32

A while back in PyCon UK I met some of the people behind http://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/ It’s awesome just how fast and accurate they can be, and most devs were of my mindset “wow can I learn to type like that - it woukd solve this problem and that” Till we found out just how much work is needed to get good. It’s a true skill, and sadly undervalued but something that just has too little pro for the cons - in…

Steno will get you to 200+ wpm, not 100.

I've been trying to learn steno on and off for 5+ years. The problem is I already have 150 WPM on qwerty and I cannot think of a message on Teams faster than I currently type. The opportunity cost is far too large to justify unless you need to transcribe someone else's speech.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?

#53

Post by op00to »

fn-mote wrote: post #26
op00to wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t you just create new chords that represent the most commonly typed code components?

Yes, but people who use an IDE will already have support for “code snippets” and completions, so you need to look for a different advantage to create.

Good point - I bet completions are much quicker in practice than a chord for commonly used snippets. At least the number of chords a normal human can remember!

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?

#54

Post by Clubber »

From what I understand, stenography adopts a keyboard to a language allowing a person to type multiple keys at the same time to write a "code" that can be translated to English.

Programming languages don't have such constraints because the language can be fluid to adopt to the keyboard. A good example is C compared to the much less terse Delphi.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?

#55

Post by bb01100100 »

roland35 wrote: post #45
uberman wrote: post #35

In my experience, typing speed is never the issue. I've worked with truly 10x and better programmers in my life and the road block for even them is thinking not typing.

Ironically writing less code is probably better!

Nah, that's not ironic.

What would be ironic is getting RSI after you chose to write less code in order to avoid getting RSI.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?

#56

Post by Froedlich »

Charles Moore, creator of the FORTH programming language, also created a one-hand "puck" keyboard that worked by chording.

Supposedly, he used it to write programs in FORTH while driving to work.

As far as the story goes, he programmed input-only, having no visual or audible way to review what he wrote.

"...and back in the day, we had to chip the edges of zeroes to make ones..."

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?

#57

Post by iepathos »

sanderjd wrote: post #24
valbaca wrote: post #6

The special phrase you want is "chord" A stenographer's keyboard is a special kind of chord keyboard for spoken English. There are other kinds of chord keyboards, but look into those. For example: - https://www.charachorder.com/ - https://github.com/davidphilipbarr/Sweep Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30515912

Somewhat hilariously, having perused your first two links, and followed the link from Sweep to Ferris, I still find myself having no idea how any of this works. (But I know a lot about how the firmware and PCB layout is designed!).

I have a charachorder. It's similar to music theory where you can hit individual notes to make up a chord. With chording you hit multiple keys usually that are part of a larger word and it outputs the associated word. This means instead of having to hit every individual key in sequence to type out a phrase one character at a time, you hit multiple keys at once to output words at a time. In the time it takes to output a single character on a keyboard someone on a charachorder did the entire word already. The longer the word the more speed is gained from this. It takes a lot of time to learn though, like a solid month of practice just to get near speeds I have with normal keyboard. Significantly helps with hand strain from typing all day due to requiring far less hand movement.

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?

#58

Post by intelVISA »

krapp wrote: post #22
casey2 wrote: post #20

The ideal amount of code you should write to solve a problem is none, but I'm sure it's been tried to antisocial results.

Yes, I doubt the people paying you to write code will find that argument very convincing...

...are people actually paid to write code? It's a means not an end!

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?

#59

Post by eviks »

uberman wrote: post #35

In my experience, typing speed is never the issue. I've worked with truly 10x and better programmers in my life and the road block for even them is thinking not typing.

It's not a roadblock, but it is an issue since faster typing leaves you with more time for thinking, but also has can have an important side-benefit of not breaking flow if you're not distracted for long

Re: Ask HN: Has anyone tried adapting a court reporter keyboard for writing code?

#60

Post by LorenPechtel »

uberman wrote: post #35

In my experience, typing speed is never the issue. I've worked with truly 10x and better programmers in my life and the road block for even them is thinking not typing.

Speed is not all that important but being able to reliably touch type is. The translation from the mental to the screen should be done with a minimum of conscious thought as that detracts from thinking about the code.

To the extent it's important at all it's a matter of removing mental load. Anything you have thought of but not yet put on the screen is load.

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