Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 110 posts

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

#91

Post by Pet_Ant »

rhelz wrote: post #9

For programming, querty-typing speed is not really a bottleneck for me. I already don't think as fast as I type. I would like to be able to take notes as fast as people are talking, though, and for that you do need a chording keyboard.

I would argue that for writing code sure, but that programming also includes communicating with other people and writing documentation. In those cases being able to type faster really is an asset. I've worked with multiple older programmers whose typing speed is not up to snuff and they turn anything more than a trivial question into a Teams call just not to type things out.

...but yeah, for actually writing code IntelliSense or whatever just makes it fast enough that if you can touch type at any speed you are not gonna be bottlenecked.

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

#92

Post by Pet_Ant »

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

Apparently CharaChorder 2 was launched 2 hours ago so this makes me suspicious this may be a plant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLHPH9uBXU

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

#93

Post by rattray »

jjmarr wrote: post #52
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.

How'd you get to 150?

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

#95

Post by brokenmachine »

rgoulter wrote: post #73

The best value-for-effort upgrade to keyboards for coders would be to get a keyboard where each thumb can use two-three keys each (rather than just being able to use a single giant spacebar). Stenography looks like 'high effort, high reward'. Whereas, bringing keys like backspace, enter, esc, tab to within easy reach of the hands on home row is going to be a big increase in comfort (and I'd be surprised if it was slo…

Ergodox. You can use it for steno as well if you want.

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

#97

Post by jjmarr »

rattray wrote: post #93
jjmarr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How'd you get to 150?

Honestly, lots of practice. I've been playing Roblox since 2008. Roblox has also always been text chat, so if I wanted to talk trash AND get kills, I had to be fast.

That + a physical inability to handwrite so I've typed virtually everything.

It's kind of useless. I almost never encounter a scenario outside of live transcription where I can conceptualize a character stream faster than my fingers can input the stream into a computer. The only programming scenario where that's an issue is LaTeX during a lecture because it's very verbose in places. I also do competitive debate which has a heavy focus on note-taking; high WPMs are useful there.

But neither of these two things will be important once I graduate university.

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

#98

Post by replwoacause »

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

I got interested in the charachorder after seeing their promos for it on YouTube… “type at the speed of thought“… but after spending some time researching it, found that the learning curve was very steep, even for the most dedicated and ambitious folks, and that there were several bugs (repeating keys on a single press) that hurt the experience.

Looks cool though and I respect the innovation.

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

#99

Post by replwoacause »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #92
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

Apparently CharaChorder 2 was launched 2 hours ago so this makes me suspicious this may be a plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYLHPH9uBXU

I did see in my research of this product and company that their marketing claims/practices are questionable sometimes.
Post reply on HN