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Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

openstenoproject.org

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Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#21

Post by bsdubernerd »

fnord77 wrote: post #4

> Stenographers stroke chords instead of typing keys, resulting in less movement and better ergonomics than typing. over the years I've seen various chord-style keyboard schemes. I've wondered why none have caught on - seems more logical than hitting individual keys.

For starters, chording requires significantly more hand coordination than a normal keyboard. This is a significant show-stopper for many.

Think about all the people you know that still have to look at the keyboard to type, that type just using one finger and one hand at a time, that still hunt for common symbols. None of this would work with a chording keyboard.

Unless you're transcribing, typing is not usually a limiting factor. This is especially true for programmers. For example I'm using three different keyboard layouts due to the commonality of languages around here and as a result I keep doing typos due to switching. I never bothered on improving because it's simply not a limiting factor.

What's even more ironic to me, is that we would have much simpler improvements to keyboards to make RSI and typing more efficient with minimal impact (I'm thinking ortholinear layouts - not chording!), but nobody really seems to care.

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#22

Post by charcircuit »

jore wrote: post #3

can stenography be used to write code? or is it only for text based on speech?

It's not practical due to coding requiring special symbols, camelCase, and you tend to not write code just going forward.

Steno is good for transcription or taking notes, but it's not great at other things.

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#23

Post by noduerme »

I was always curious about this. My dad was a lawyer. I basically learned to touch type by transcribing legal dictations. From about 11 years old I used to earn my allowance by typing up depositions that had been recorded in his office. My mom had an electric typewriter and a tape machine with a foot pedal attachment that let you play or rewind the tape with your right foot. They'd pay me $2 an hour to sit and type them out. Formatting was important. For me it was like a game. I was always slightly jealous of the people who could use those court reporter machines, and wondered how they did it. Seemed like magic.

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#24

Post by keyle »

jore wrote: post #14
_flux wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can. Here's an example of using Plover (now part of the openstenography project it seems): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=711T2simRyI (I know this is not the only presentation in the existence but it's one that I found; there's one by the author of Plover within some longer presentation about it.) Honestly, doesn't seem super fast to me :-).

thanks, it also does not look fast to me and does not seem to improve the process the way it does for speech. Additionally I guess there is a steep learning curve so it is definitely not for everybody

The thing about code though is that it is succinct by design and a lot of thinking goes into writing 3 lines of code that will work coherently.

So with typing keywords fast and efficient auto-completion, I doubt Steno would somehow make you a faster developer.

Clarity and correctness rules over speed here.

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#25

Post by zozbot234 »

jore wrote: post #3

can stenography be used to write code? or is it only for text based on speech?

Stenography is inherently language-dependent, and most existing steno "theories" (i.e. input systems) are tailored towards natural-language text; hence one would have to design a special "theory" for each programming language, and provide custom steno chords (or chord sequences) for each identifier within any given project. So it would involve a lot of work, but the benefit could also be significant since steno seems to be a lot less RSI-prone than traditional keyboard typing.

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#26

Post by t-3 »

bodge5000 wrote: post #18
fnord77 wrote: post #4

> Stenographers stroke chords instead of typing keys, resulting in less movement and better ergonomics than typing. over the years I've seen various chord-style keyboard schemes. I've wondered why none have caught on - seems more logical than hitting individual keys.

I suppose the same reason why qwerty still reigns supreme despite being a purposefully inefficient layout, people know it. On a similar note I was talking to someone recently about touch screen phone keyboards, and how compressing a qwerty keyboard onto a (relative to the size of actual keyboards) tiny screen with very little haptic feedback seemed like an awful idea that was used early on because it was easy to unde…

I was very pleasantly surprised to find that my muscle memory for "real" QWERTY keyboards works on touch keyboards as well. I know people who can "touch type" (as in, without looking) on touchscreens as well. I doubt anyone would be able to become so adept if the layouts were different.

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#27

Post by laumars »

charcircuit wrote: post #22
jore wrote: post #3

can stenography be used to write code? or is it only for text based on speech?

It's not practical due to coding requiring special symbols, camelCase, and you tend to not write code just going forward. Steno is good for transcription or taking notes, but it's not great at other things.

In addition to that, I’d wager few people have long bouts of thinking code faster than they can type it. The act of typing is usually the easiest part of the whole process.

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#28

Post by jeroenhd »

Steno shows up around here every now and then and it makes me more curious to try it every time it pops up. Does anyone here have experience with using steno in a bilingual context?

I understand that chords are mapped to words through a dictionary of sorts, usually based on how the words are pronounced, but I expect different dictionaries to clash. I suppose it's possible to manually remap the entire dictionary for conflicting words, but that's a lot of work.

Is there an easy way to switch dictionaries/languages? Has anyone tried this?

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#29

Post by Aeolun »

mkl wrote: post #11
factorialboy wrote: post #5

Forgive me, but is steno relevant going forward? Would recording audio and NLP be more effective? Genuine question, no snark.

Speech recognition is terrible on specialised vocabulary, strong accents, low quality audio, etc. You can train it, but only if you have transcriptions of your audio. Steno is a good way to make transcriptions. I have mathematics education videos I would like subtitles for, all in non-US, non-UK accents, full of specialised terminology. In my tests, Amazon and Google's APIs were completely useless for this, as was Dr…

Amazon’s API fails any time someone uses a slightly less than super common name. It was really depressing.

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#30

Post by ArchieMaclean »

jeroenhd wrote: post #28

Steno shows up around here every now and then and it makes me more curious to try it every time it pops up. Does anyone here have experience with using steno in a bilingual context? I understand that chords are mapped to words through a dictionary of sorts, usually based on how the words are pronounced, but I expect different dictionaries to clash. I suppose it's possible to manually remap the entire dictionary for c…

I haven't tried it, but there is a list of available dictionaries in Plover format [1] including French, Spanish and Italian.

As to switching on the fly, I can't see anything in the docs about it - this extension might work? [2]

[1] https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/List-of-Avai...

[2] https://github.com/nsmarkop/plover_system_switcher

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