<story><title>Typing at 255 WPM shouldn&apos;t cost $4000</title><url>http://opensource.com/life/11/12/open-source-changes-face-stenography-and-possibilities-hearing-impaired</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>naner</author><text>How she envisions stenography would be used for programming:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stenoknight.com/WritingCoding.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://stenoknight.com/WritingCoding.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Programming is especially suited for steno, because there&apos;s so much boilerplate to write again and again, even in an eloquent language like Python. If I want to define a function, I have to type:&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;def someFunction(arg): stuff.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;That&apos;s eight strokes just to get started, plus 20 more strokes to write &quot;someFunction&quot;, &quot;arg&quot;, and &quot;stuff&quot;. In steno, on the other hand, you could write something like D&lt;/i&gt;FD in a single stroke, and it would put in the def, the space, the parentheses, the colon and the carriage return automatically, then jump you up to the space after the def to write your function name and arguments, then then drop you back down to the body of the function, all in four strokes. Best of all, once you defined that function name in your steno dictionary, you wouldn&apos;t need to worry about remembering to write out the name in camel case each time. Just use a single stroke like SPHU&lt;i&gt;PBGS (pronounced &quot;smunction&quot;), for instance, and start thinking of it as just another word, instead of two words mashed together in a lexically unnatural way.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;I love the way Vim has mapped a useful command to each key of the qwerty keyboard. It&apos;s immensely powerful once you get used to it. But it&apos;s only got 26 keys to choose from, and it takes a long time to learn which key does what, since the correlation between &quot;move one word forward&quot; and the &quot;w&quot; key is pretty abstract and arbitrary. In steno, you could certainly keep using just the w key, if it&apos;s what you&apos;re used to, but you could also, say, map the &quot;move one word forward&quot; command to a single stroke like &quot;WOFRD&quot; (pronounced &quot;woffered&quot;). That&apos;s mnemonically much more useful than just &quot;w&quot;, and an even bigger advantage is that the number of possible one-stroke commands is almost infinite. Instead of one stroke equalling one letter, steno lets one stroke equal one syllable, which is about five times more efficient quantitatively. As a qualitative improvement, the advantage is inestimable.&lt;/i&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>All of that either already exists as described, or keystroke-count equivalents exist, in every programmer editor. If people aren&apos;t using it in existing editors they sure aren&apos;t going to pick up a radically different keyboard layout to use it.&lt;p&gt;(Said the guy who types in an increasingly-heavily-modified Dvorak layout. I recently mapped Backspace to &quot;change window&quot; (i.e., ALT-Tab in most WMs), since I long since moved Backspace to Caps Lock. You can&apos;t be much more willing to fiddle with your keyboard layout than I am.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Typing at 255 WPM shouldn&apos;t cost $4000</title><url>http://opensource.com/life/11/12/open-source-changes-face-stenography-and-possibilities-hearing-impaired</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>naner</author><text>How she envisions stenography would be used for programming:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stenoknight.com/WritingCoding.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://stenoknight.com/WritingCoding.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Programming is especially suited for steno, because there&apos;s so much boilerplate to write again and again, even in an eloquent language like Python. If I want to define a function, I have to type:&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;def someFunction(arg): stuff.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;That&apos;s eight strokes just to get started, plus 20 more strokes to write &quot;someFunction&quot;, &quot;arg&quot;, and &quot;stuff&quot;. In steno, on the other hand, you could write something like D&lt;/i&gt;FD in a single stroke, and it would put in the def, the space, the parentheses, the colon and the carriage return automatically, then jump you up to the space after the def to write your function name and arguments, then then drop you back down to the body of the function, all in four strokes. Best of all, once you defined that function name in your steno dictionary, you wouldn&apos;t need to worry about remembering to write out the name in camel case each time. Just use a single stroke like SPHU&lt;i&gt;PBGS (pronounced &quot;smunction&quot;), for instance, and start thinking of it as just another word, instead of two words mashed together in a lexically unnatural way.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;I love the way Vim has mapped a useful command to each key of the qwerty keyboard. It&apos;s immensely powerful once you get used to it. But it&apos;s only got 26 keys to choose from, and it takes a long time to learn which key does what, since the correlation between &quot;move one word forward&quot; and the &quot;w&quot; key is pretty abstract and arbitrary. In steno, you could certainly keep using just the w key, if it&apos;s what you&apos;re used to, but you could also, say, map the &quot;move one word forward&quot; command to a single stroke like &quot;WOFRD&quot; (pronounced &quot;woffered&quot;). That&apos;s mnemonically much more useful than just &quot;w&quot;, and an even bigger advantage is that the number of possible one-stroke commands is almost infinite. Instead of one stroke equalling one letter, steno lets one stroke equal one syllable, which is about five times more efficient quantitatively. As a qualitative improvement, the advantage is inestimable.&lt;/i&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jach</author><text>An interesting take, though I thought most IDEs have most of those features already? (I personally dislike features that auto-jump me around apart from auto-indent.) It&apos;s funny she brought up vim since vim can be made to do those things as well; it&apos;s not limited to 26 characters since you can have multicharacter commands in any mode just fine.&lt;p&gt;I still don&apos;t really &quot;get&quot; the syllable perspective but it seems like it&apos;s just a mapping of one stroke (I think my confusion is what constitutes a &quot;stroke&quot;) on specialized hardware to several on a qwerty board? So I guess you&apos;re limited to the number of keys on a qwerty board for single-point-of-entry commands with vim, but you could always use the specialty keyboard and map the output of those as multi-character vim commands... It seems the main benefit is having those mappings done for you and available system-wide.</text></comment>