Ask HN: Anyone Here Using Stenography

No advice, sorry! It's a rare example (for me) of having a skill despite never having actively worked at improving it, and my touch typing form is not good even though the speed is high. I had a lot of classical guitar lessons as a teenager and that seems more likely to be related than anything else. Would be curious to hear whether the correlation with being an instrumentalist shows up for other people too.

Well, maybe one piece of advice for a small boost in speed -- I got into mechanical keyboards for a few years, and eventually had to conclude that full height keys slow me down a lot compared to cheap laptop chiclet keyboards, so eventually I swapped back to using those.

There is open software for stenography here:

https://www.openstenoproject.org/

I don't use it. I consider thinking to be the bottleneck (or maneuvering in your IDE / terminal, if you're doing lots of refactoring, maybe)

Before I got into programming I did stenography. I was able to type at 240+ WPM with 98+% accuracy, it took me about a year and a half to attain that speed. When I got into programming I sold my steno machine and haven't done anything related to it since.

I'm sure there are some programmers or writers using stenography successfully, but I don't think it's practical personally. My bottleneck when programming is not typing speed but how quickly I can decide on what to type next. I can type at 130 WPM on a qwerty keyboard, it just is not a bottleneck.

Moreover, it's not easy to learn. Assuming you're a decent typer on a regular keyboard, you are going to be slogging through typing for at least a year, and then who knows. Some people seem to be incapable of achieving the high speeds that you're seeing professionals reach. There were people at my school that were there for 4+ years, seemingly unable to reach the graduation speed/accuracy requirements despite practicing more than I ever did.

The speeds are also misleading. People see 240+ WPM and think that's the end of it, but that speed and accuracy is typically measured differently than it should be. The WPM count does not typically include the proofreading and editing after the fact. Meaning you can have typos, you can leave words out, it's fine as long as you can properly decipher the typos / what was actually said based on context.

There are stenography standards you can learn, but to actually achieve the speed you're looking for people end up making their own language constructs to shorten things (called briefs at my school). Maybe you're a court reporter and you hear a lot of phrases such as "Did there come a time" - you might shorten this entire sentence to one keystroke. Everyone ends up typing in their own bastardized version of the standard unique to them.

I left stenography because I felt like it was destroying my body. It takes a toll on your hands, shoulders, body.

Ultimately the entire process of getting good at stenography is very time consuming, I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze. Just my two cents, good luck to you if you do decide to pursue it.

This may not be your problem, but if you look at the keyboard while typing you need to stop. Other than that, you should look into using proper form. Make sure your fingers are resting where they should be when you're at rest. Make sure you're using the recommended fingers for each key on the keyboard. For example I used to press the Y key with my left index finger but it's quicker to press with the right index finger. Your keyboard can also make a big difference here. I don't have a recommendation on what keyboard to get but my typing speed suffers if I'm not using a good keyboard.