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Comment by jnty | Hacker News Reader

Why did these never take off, even in a 'big niche' way? Is corrected typing on a smartphone sufficiently speedy for it not to matter? Is the skill required more at the 'musical instrument' level than the 'touch typing' level? Something to do with voice recognition always getting better?

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Price, availability. For instance, steno software costed thousands of dollars. But this is about to change:

- Plover is a free, cross-platform steno software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZGuBV1xe64

- This Canadian guy develops cool, quality steno and ergonomic boards. The Georgi is $95USD - significantly less expensive than alternatives. There aren't any official reviews yet, but Plover users on Discord seem to really like it.

https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi (web site appears temporarily down though - was up yesterday.)

I'm planning to buy one this week - trying to get my boss to cover it since it will help with my mild RSI.

Don't forget the QWERTY mode! Steno requires a huge time commitment to learn, chorded QWERTY much less so.

And if you don't like it, it's a QMK based board so it can be reprogrammed!

http://docs.gboards.ca/Unboxing-Georgi

There's also the more traditional Ergodox-like Gergo that is mostly a normal QWERTY board with some ergonomic improvements.

https://www.gboards.ca/category/gergo

OLKB Planck keyboards [0] (presumably Preonics as well) also come with a Plover layout included in the default firmware.

[0] https://olkb.com/planck

There's a long motor-skill learning curve with these.

I've tried the "handykey twiddler" years ago and I just could not get motivated to practice enough to use the thing in real life.

For mobile use, the situation is is even worse because it requires the user to carry another piece of hardware in addition to the phone. Chording keyboards existed well before smartphones came on the scene, and the thinking was that you would have some type of heads-up/eyeglass display like Google-glass.

I guess it's just one of those funny things that people thought would be hot in the future but never materialized or turned out to not be desirable when it did.

If you're typing a single letter at a time, from what I've read, a chorded keyboard tends to be significantly slower because that's just how fingers work. (Similar to how a pianist can play melodies much faster than they can repeat chords, because they're not using the same finger twice in a row.)

If you assign common words or syllables to additional chords, then speed goes back up, but it becomes so much harder to learn -- so much memorization.

Stenographers (like in court) use a keyboard that relies on simultaneous keys (the chord principle, but still with more keys than fingers) to achieve speeds even greater than normal speech, with their own predefined combinations (tons of practice to learn) -- but unless you're transcribing speech in court or providing live closed captioning, it doesn't seem to be a skill worth investing in.

I have used a chorded keyboard for Braille. It's extra quick because there are single "chords" for common combinations like [and] [the] and [ing]. Even longer words like "people" have short-hand versions of one or two chords. The memorization isn't horrible, but I have to admit I've forgotten a lot over the years.

loosely speaking, I think there's a limit on finger actions per unit time, so if you're spending more per letter, you're getting a lower WPM

as an example, Matias' one-hand keyboard, in which half of the characters cost an extra keypress, had people getting up to 75% of their normal qwerty WPM [1]

I've never seen any study of a chording keyboard doing more than 70 WPM without a steno style multiple character output system

[1]: http://edgarmatias.com/papers/ic93/

They take significant practice to even get started, so the barrier to entry is pretty high. With a normal keyboard, anyone who can see and spell can immediately use it.

Made and tried to use a sort of chorded keyboard out of a keypad. The idea breaks down when you need to emit some key combination like Command-Shift-[ (I am a Mac user).

At a minimum you'd need your keyboard to support NKRO, N-Key Roll-over, and you'd need a software like Plover.

My solution to that was to have a command mode that separates out the individual keys. So you'd stroke Command/Meta/Shift/[/Command and it would send them all together.

A bit cumbersome, but for conflicting sequences like that you use often you'd bind it to it's own separate chord (or bind Meta+Shift to a chord).

Learning curve I guess. Usually "easy" devices take off.

The "40% keyboard" is part-way there, and has been a growing niche since 2015.

The concept actually did take off, but it doesn't look like piano chords. I think that keyboard shortcuts that use modifier keys are basically the same idea, and that's regularly used across every desktop OS.

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