Anyone Here Using Stenography

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.

I started learning this week. Added a steno layer to my QMK-based keyboard, installed Plover, and off I went. I did some practice exercises, where it just shows you what keys to press to enter certain words, and tried that. I'm at about 5 words per minute. It's that hard to move my fingers to the right place and press them all down at once.

I'm going to stick with it, but I can see why people require years of training before they become court reporters or whatever.

Oh, and all these keyboards dedicated to steno that have like 12g activation force switches? I can see why they do that. I have 60g switches, and it's quite a bit of effort to press two keys with the same finger (which is often required). I might build myself a dedicated steno keyboard, and swap the sprints in the keys with something lighter.

I'm a fast qwerty typist (135wpm) who looked into steno but ultimately decided not to put the effort in to learning.

I was surprised to discover that learning steno theory is much like learning a new foreign language due to the use of steno word dictionaries, and it takes most learners a few years of full-time study to get fast. (Of course, like with foreign languages, a small percentage of learners are able to go much faster.)

I think I'd prefer to put effort into a chording system with more predictability and less memorization (I've heard that Velotype might be a good match). Or failing that, I'd rather learn an actual new foreign language :)

Just learned that there are two different things, stenotype, which uses a special keyboard (mostly in the US?), and stenography, a form of hand writing, which some of the comments refer to. Interesting.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand

My grandfather, a teacher in peace times and Wehrmacht Lt in WWII, reportedly used steno to write notes on impossibly small pieces of paper. I guess the savings in paper suited his extremely frugal mindset, sharpened by the two world wars and two post-war periods he had to live through.

Maybe you can check out https://www.charachorder.com/

Its not a steno keyboard, but I think its better suited for programming and general writing.

It has two modes, entry mode and chord mode:

- In entry mode you press each key to make words like a normal keyboard. - In chord mode, you press multiple keys at the same time and the internal processor rewrites the word correctly or something like that.

There are two types, CharaChorder and CharaChorder Lite: - The Lite its like a regular keyboard, but you can use the chord entry mode. - The original one instead of 1D keys, uses 4D keys that are like joysticks.

I love the idea of steno-like keyboards such as the gerkin, but I haven’t been able to go below 40 keys on a split keyboard myself without significantly changing my tools.

My main editor for example (vscode) heavily uses modifier based shortcuts and with less keys the overlap of modifiers and normal characters is too high and becomes confusing for me. I already have basic characters mapped to modifiers, ie click for tab, hold for ctrl and click for space, hold for layer2. Moving to chord based shortcuts might help but that means completely changing both my input and ways of working at the same time.

https://www.artofchording.com/ is your friend for getting started with steno. The plover discord is also a great resource. Learning steno theory can be intimidating, my recommendation is not to set a goal timeline for being “productive”. Put in a half hour a day and just take it one chord at a time.

I own several steno specific keyboards, and the Uni is my least favorite. An EcoSteno seems just to be overall better if you want a solid body keyboard, but my preference is a Georgi if you can get ahold of one.

Plover was great when in university and taking lecture classes. Let me keep up with lecturers and gave me a fun activity (learning steno) to keep me awake during boring lectures. Utterly useless for note taking as transcripts are really not great to study from, but what I'd do is come back at the end of the week and re-read all of my transcripts to create little study guides. Ended up working really well. Main downside is I didn't have the money to buy a chorded keyboard and steno on a normal laptop is really hard.

I sometimes use stenographic handwriting, which is different from the question. One insight I had is that swiping on the iPad is fundamentally faster than stenography, because the information density of these curves is higher: you have more context sensitive starting point and swirls. The only thing that is even faster is speech recognition (google > siri) ... and maybe the stenography OP asked about, which is probably not worth the learning curve given how ubiquitous speech recognition is becoming.

No I don't like it because it's heavily encouraged that every stenographer heavily modify their dictionary, making it harder to learn. There's a million and one different theories, it's somewhat strange.

I've been very intrigued by asetniop[1], but haven't had a chance to really try it. It's a chording keyboard (or rather, layout), and offers a more intuitive transition from qwerty.

P.s. gboards has a board [2] (and qmk firmware) designed for it.

[1] https://asetniop.com/

[2] https://www.gboards.ca/product/ginni

Nice coincidence, the following was just submitted:

Open Steno Project – freeing stenography https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29035644

> Traditionally, getting started with steno cost thousands of dollars. We enable anyone to learn stenography for free

> The Open Steno Project [was] formed to support Plover and related projects

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)

Steno cannot help you be faster in programming. In addition to the added cognitive load, steno typing is a lossy map to natural speech, and you can expect it to be even worse for coding with all its unconventional typography.

There is open software for stenography here:

https://www.openstenoproject.org/

If you end up using it lots, making a cool tool, or having some epic disasters it could make a great Show HN or blog post!