Open Steno Project: Bringing Stenography to Everyone
openstenoproject.org
openstenoproject.org
imagine writing code as fast as your thoughts are?
Well, also a note: programming is not typing. it's 90% thinking. But at the end of the thought process, it just burns to turn your thoughts into working code ASAP! It would be so nice to streamline, optimize the process of the thought to code transfer. Until mind readers are invented, steno is a great solution
I'm skeptical that typing is the bottleneck you think it is on the code-writing front.
>Why should I spend time implementing this logic as a function when I can just use macros to type it 5 times with 5 key strokes?
I remember once in undergrad we had a particularly gnarly computation problem to tackle. Some people's code ran as long as 40 minutes. Most were around the 10-15 minute mark. A few were in the 4-5 minute range.
Mine ran in 50 seconds. No one else came even close.
Now, I get that that's not always required. For a one off calculation, it makes no sense to spend 3 hours of developer time to save 1 hour. But if you have to run it 10, 100, 1000 times it starts to make a lot of sense.
I can hack together a convoluted piece of shit pretty quick. No design doc, documentation, design elements that would give me flexibility or error checking. There are always compromises, but I just find it's extremely rare that my typing speed is the limiting factor. It always seems like spending a bit more time thinking about design saves me time in the end.
Maybe you're John Von Neumann or something but like I said, I'm just pretty skeptical.
EDIT: also how many times in your career you had a problem where you had to make a significant and time consuming effort over that one line of code (other than hackathons, of course). With practically all high-level langs in modern collaborative environments readability is prioritized. “I should be able to read your code as a well written prose” - uncle Bob’s statement, is pretty much universal doctrine. Ability to type fast here is greatly underestimated
Readability and verbosity are two different things. I can see how someone using Java would think that typing faster is better. But that's a reflection of poor language design choices rather than anything intrinsic to programming.
Maybe its easier to specifically describe the code/problem?
For the best speedups, refactoring crappy code isn't going to cut it. It WILL still result in some nice performance boosts, and it's a good way to code in general. But when performance is absolutely essential, you're probably going to have to completely redesign from the ground up.
Mostly it seems like it just comes down to focusing on the parts that are going to take the vast majority of time and then just thinking very, very deeply about the problem you need to solve in that chunk. (Including asking if you're solving the right problem!) and what each and every function call or operation does, and trying to be as smart as you possibly can. Some fairly subtle things here working with intrinsic libraries can sometimes do some really stupid things behind the scenes that are hard to spot. Be careful to avoid any extra steps that are unnecessary, where data might get copied in memory unnecessarily or things like that.
Most of the time for the real speedups, I was writing my own libraries in Fortran that were custom tailored to the problem I was trying to solve. This is important because you might find some weird data validation being done or something that isn't relevant to your pipeline, but is included for generality.
There's certainly no magic bullet, but the most important is thinking hard about your problem, make sure you're solving the right one and the next most important thing is probably custom tailoring the libraries if you have time. ...assuming it's a problem that isn't so well solved. Sometimes that can be a waste of time of course, because your use case isn't so unusual.
Strictly speaking I don't need to use Vim to write and edit my code and it doesn't impact my typing speed in the slightest, however it cuts delays when modifying code(moving hands to mouse, to arrow keys etc.) much shorter and makes the whole thing feel more direct.
Although from my perspective I have my doubts if switching from something like Vim to a steno keyboard would be worth the time investment. For the usual text and many other tasks I can definitely get behind the idea, though.
For example, both vim and emacs have snippet or template plugins (ex: yastnippet, snipmate, ultisnips, xptemplate, etc) that can be activated with a short keystroke and which then expand to whatever code or text the user desires. Then, depending on the features of the snippet/templating plugin in question lots of other advanced behavior (such as selecting items from a menu, activating sub-snippets/sub-templates, etc) can be activated. No need to use a steno keyboard for any of this.
Weirdly, though developed for Georgi the lightweight springs have found themselves back into Gergo and GergoPlex as users have reported it helping with their RSI flareups (compared to traditional mechs)
I used that for a couple common symbols in LaTeX' math mode, e.g. entering ;lra gets me a \leftrightarrow.
But I wouldn't recommend that approach for multi-line snippets and more complex cases, the config will get unreadable otherwise.
It was a totally amazing experience, and for a non native speaker allowed me to catch every joke and nuance (or so I think).
At one time the speaker was talking about the scaffolding system of Angular that I can't remember the name of right now and it became a bit recursive with templates of templates and that was the only time when the stenographer lagged slightly, the speaker realized and took it a bit further until the stenographer realized it and made a witty comment instead.
Watch the video from BangBangCon 2019 on steganography for one example; the presenter hid data in audio files, so the stenographer carefully described the data-enabled files as sounding "perfectly normal, unsuspicious".
I have begun the path to learning stenography. Steno involves chording, or pressing multiple keys at once. Multiple keys at once means greatly improving the information density of when you type allowing professionals to type 240 words per minute (realtime), which is just not possible on single-key-at-a-time keyboards. Unfortunately most commonly available, non-gaming keyboards do not natively support multiple keys at once which is also known as n-key rollover (nkro). I ended up buying a pre-assembled, fully opensource hacker keyboard Ergodox EZ⁰, and have a custom layout firmware that matches up with the open steno project¹ . From here I am using Querty Steno² to practice my chording. Here is an example video someone did of using steno for programming a simple FizzBuzz on a different keyboard on YouTube³. In my opinion, if anyone is looking to really take their typing to the next level, chording is the only way and Dvorak/Colmak/single-key-at-a-time-layouts will never really get you there.
At least this one actually seems to remember their inputs well enough, I wonder how many times they practiced? I've seen similar videos before and it is hilarious to watch when they're trying to recall the chords they programmed.
I don't see this scaling for real projects with thousands and thousands of complicated identifiers, camelcase, crazy abbreviatin, acronyms, etc. Each project is going to have its own set of identifiers and you're going to need a custom dictionary for each of them.
Steno is great for natural languages that evolve very slowly over time and which can be largely learnt once and then used forever. Code is a rather different beast.
I know. It also takes only a few seconds to look up a word in a dictionary.
It takes much longer to memorize thousands of ever-changing chords for different projects. And when you haven't memorized them, typing is going to be very slow and awkward. Kinda like trying to write an essay when you need a dictionary for every other word.
I'm skeptical of this. A chord sequence is of similar complexity to an identifier (the keys on a stenotype keyboard have mnemonic designations to make this easier), and people memorize commonly-used identifiers just fine, as part of getting familiar with a new project.
https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi
https://stenomod.blogspot.com/
I'm typing this, in Plover, on a georgi.
My brand new ThinkPad laptop has a keyboard with a pleasant feel, and a high-end GPU for (among other things) a 3D hand-pose human interface. But the keyboard is 2 KRO. :/
After decades of looking, and with screen-comparable AR coming in next year, I kind of expect to move on from the laptop form factor before ever finding one that doesn't feel like an HID facepalm.
So if you want to optimize for typing another language, you can swap in corresponding dictionaries and type away. There's only the slight problem that there might not yet exist any for your language...
I have dabbled in creating an orthographic stenography solution for international use, but never quite finished it: https://github.com/kqr/qweyboard
If I could be paid to work half a year (or just a month or two) to work on anything I wanted, this would be it.
I need to type code in my messages sometimes (like quick help for a colleague). I think it would be a nightmare with T9.
[0] https://github.com/benoit-pierre/plover_michela
[1] http://xahlee.info/kbd/i/michela_stenotype_system_81845.pdf
A decent web intro: http://realerthinks.com/teeline-for-the-curious-a-story-of-l...
A text on some general rules (intermediate level?): http://natashacspencer.blogspot.com/2010/10/introduction-to-...
A searchable dictionary, good as a reference: http://realerthinks.com/a-searchable-teeline-dictionary/
I also bought the "The Teeline Gold Course Bk". It's good.
Another one which I bought (used for a few dollars) but not yet opened is "Teeline Gold Word List".
HTH
I want my writing to be faster while taking notes in meetings and slightly obufiscated if I drop my journal somewhere, it still needs to be interpreted by me years or possibly decades down the road, or by my successors after I'm gone.
That means that I needed to use teeline over Gregg or Pitman because the ladder are designed for quickly transcribing while you know the subject matter, and that's if you really approach those shorthand notes taken after decades can be extremely difficult to interpret back to English words.
Teeline is grounded in the English letters themselves and so as long as you're consistent with your rules and or consistently inconsistent with your house rules, then someone who learns to interpret a few of your words can slowly but surely unearth all of your words.
I wouldn't say that it's excellent now. It still has a long way to go. Small example, try enabling captions in Google's meet. Those are awful. Don't get a lot of words right, if you have an accent it's even worse. And distinguishing between different people talking? Forget about it...
It would look funky though, and I've read from people having problems with their voice after an 8 hour day speaking software.
Problem is probably not just speaking software. Talking for that long is tough. Period.