Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions
vice.com
vice.com
Anyway, this is cool but basically just a modern stenography device. Steno has a learning curve problem that makes it so most people won't use it.
QWERTY is more 'what you see is what you get' - you push a key and you get that letter. Sure the layout is weird and learning to type takes some effort, but there's very little additional cognitive load. It's like a WYSIWYG editor.
Steno is like Vim, you have to have all of the phrases in your head tracking a lookup table cognitively. Over time sure that becomes muscle memory and lowers the load but I think it's less gradual. You have to frontload a lot of the commands first. IME most people will never do that so it'll always remain niche.
like vim.. winces in anticipation of things thrown at him
Now 15 years later I really enjoy the flow of the layout, a majority of the time when typing you alternate between sides of the keyboard when typing and it just feels good.
I was worried about it with Workman because it was slightly less logical. h still left of l, but quite far away, j and k are placed so that it's like you've inverted your camera controls in a game. Very easy to adjust anyway and I don't really think about it now. Your point about w and b is very good as well. Advanced vim users are actually less likely to use hjkl much due to having faster ways to get around in most cases.
Forgetting to configure computers after finishing with them, not knowing what layout was in use in the login screen, initial configuration, etc all cost time. I also use RDP a lot which is layout roulette (sometimes it changes, sometimes it doesn’t)
Why not just remap? My intuition is that the cascading conflict wouldn't be that hard to resolve (at least compared to learning Dvorak...) but maybe I'm wrong.
It makes it way easier to communicate via text.
I learned touch typing within a week on holiday vacation with a software similar to this website: https://www.typingstudy.com/ (Young me felt very proud of being able to type like dad.) Once you have invested the time to learn the basic movements, you will become accustomed to them naturally.
just to make the pedantic point, learning curves show skill improvement plotted against time spent/experience, and therefore a steep learning curve means you learn quickly. A shallow learning curve is the difficult one. /pedantry
It's not wrong to say "steep learning curve" if you mean it's easy
I self labelled as pedantic and pointed to an explanation, that does not make me a prescriptivist, it makes me didactic.
I’m not relying on the Wikipedia article to support my claims. I’m relying on my native English language usage. I have literally never heard anyone in my life use the phrase “steep learning curve” in the way you use it. Not even once. However, I could have heard it in an ambiguous context and assumed that the speaker or writer intended to use it in the way that you do. I’ll admit, in that case, that I may have heard it used the same way you do, and assumed that they mean to use it in the way I do.
I am not making personal attacks here, so I hope I didn’t offend, not to suggest that your disagreement implies offense. If I did, I sincerely apologize.
I wonder if this is a case of certain phrases just being imprecise or ambiguous enough to be difficult to use in conversation or writing.
For example, suppose I applied some wax to a polished wood floor, way more than I thought I did or meant to apply originally.
Suddenly, you walk in from the next room or down the hall. I stop you before you slip and fall on the excess wax, saying, “Wait, I spilled a deceptively [small | large] amount of wax on the floor, and I haven’t cleaned it up yet.”
You stop in time, and don’t slip. I clean up the wax, and all is well.
If all you have is my single sentence to go on, whether I had said that I spilled a deceptively large or deceptively small amount of wax on the floor, and no additional context to know that I spilled too much wax on the floor, you might deduce from context that there must be too much wax, thus leading to a slipping hazard.
Now we’re having coffee later and I’m telling you about my vacation, and all the new flora and fauna I saw. I tell you about seeing a rare and elusive jabberwocky, and I told you it was deceptively [small | large]. Without further elaboration or context, you may struggle to deduce whether I mean that the jabberwocky is smaller or larger than expected or than it appeared, or both, or simply that it was smaller or larger than expected for jabberwockies, given just that single sentence.
Does that make sense? I used jabberwockies because they are literary creatures that do not exist in real life. You can replace them in the example with anything which you, the hypothetical listener or reader, is unfamiliar with enough to not know how small or large they are in relation to other referent in my vacation story, or anything else I was comparing it with in that context.
It appears that we can both be right, depending on usage and context. You may not agree, and seem not to; I find my usage appropriate for the contexts I use it in, and clarify with supporting statements in context so as to not confuse others, because I know that this phrase is used in both ways colloquially and mathematically.
To the degree that you insist that the phrase “steep learning curve” only has the one meaning you describe and use, I call your insistence prescriptivist. If you deny that others use the phrase correctly when they use it in ways that make sense, given the knowledge of how other people use it in ways that differ to your own, I would call that denial pedantic, and not didactic, but instead quirky, but otherwise okay, as long as we both understand what we each mean, and otherwise understand each other’s meaning and context.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6209/what-is-mea...
I had no idea this was even ambiguous before your comment.
I've hitherto only considered the possibility that "deceptively large" means "large, but appeared otherwise. Having now googled this, it seems there's some debate about it, and while I can see both arguments, I think this is down to incorrect usage muddying the water.
In "A is deceptively B", "deceptively" is an adverb, so adding extra definition to the manner in which "A is B". Short of ignoring grammar rules entirely, I can't see a good case for arguing the opposite, even though it seems that examples exist where the sentence only makes logical sense by interpreting it as a negative.
> An activity that it is easy to learn the basics of, but difficulty to gain proficiency in, may be described as having "a steep learning curve".
That matches QWERTY exactly.
yes, a curve can change its slope from "learn the basics of" vs "gain more proficiency" and any place where it's not steep indicates difficulty.
that some things might have easy basics and other things might not have easy basics isn't really material, but where it matters, picking up the basics would be steep if it is easy.
In the end, steno itself is probably not a lot harder to learn than QWERTY (although I think more frustrating because the "hunt and peck" option for steno is less intuitive and often slower). But it requires sort of a "supporting ecosystem" of skills and tools that is more complex and not amenable to use cases other than natural language. That makes it much less attractive for general use.
I had thought that chording to produce a words was enough to qualify as steno.
Happy to be corrected :)
100% agree, also it may be harder because in the US we still don't teach kids how to fucking read correctly. It's still common to have elementary school curricula that do not teach how letters are related to phonemes _at all_.
Initial learning curve is practically non-existent - Anybody can type a letter "A" or a word or a sentence on a QWERTY by looking and poking. It is not my understanding that I could do ANYthing on a stenography device without significant, serious training.
When typing the word "Unprepared" on a keyboard, you just have to look at the buttons and find each of the ones with those labels, and hit them in sequence.
To type the word "Unprepared" on a steno machine, you need to hit the buttons UPB all at once and then PRAOEPD all at once, knowing that PB is a combo that means N, that the UPB set assumes that it's a prefix to whatever follows, that AOE represents the vowel sound /i/, and that your software understands the input "preepd" to be a shorthand for 'prepared'.
You can try it out with your regular keyboard in the browser here: http://www.openstenoproject.org/demo/
Obviously if you're gonna use it as you daily driver, you'd want to get a NKRO keyboard, but the "hold one key and tap the rest" trick works for the web demo.
I tried to learn in, but I always fall back to my old habits since my right hand hurt otherwise. I don't think I will ever bother getting fast. It is probably way better to learn it properly from the beginning.
I dunno. I don't have anywhere near 60 words per minute that are actually worth recording.
Ergonomic typing however, I guess is important. And I am bad at that. Looking down to find the keys might be a bad habit? I have almost trained that away.
I don't really understand why properly trained typing is more ergonomic, anyway. If I keep my hands perfectly on the homerow, each letter is nearly the same exact motion. The way I type normally, my hands move around a bit, so there's a couple character history built into my motions. This seems to me like it ought to reduce the repetitive motions, which are what lead to repetitive strain injuries, right?
Maybe I stress my hands more while tryhard practicing touch typing than I would in normal use though.
News to me
...and from my understanding WhatsApp is very common in Europe, which can also be used from the web.
Forcing myself to stop looking at the keys initially increased error rate to an unacceptable/demotivating level, but in a couple of weeks I was touch typing quite a bit faster than I could hunt and peck with no loss in accuracy.
What worked for me was switching to dvorak. With no keycaps to match the layout, I had no option but to memorize it (initially with the help of a cheatsheet on screen). Conveniently, back then, I had no idea how to revert back to qwerty without restarting X after using xmodmap to switch layout, and I'm the type to not restart my session (or computer) except for updates every few months or so.
It also helps a lot doing this "at home" when you've nothing particularly important to do on the computer (running a basic touch typing tutor program for an hour or two and again later in the evening while just chatting away on IRC or such during the day is great because you're typing but have no real pressure). Not during work. It sucks struggling to get things done, and you're very likely to switch back to the old method and that'll just stall progress.
After one day, I had more or less memorized the layout but of course typing was still slow and somewhat frustrating. After a few days, it stopped feeling frustrating but was still a little slow. In a week or two I had reached or surpassed my original qwerty speed. I never used qwerty during that period, it was learn or bust.
Then a few years later as teenagers do in high school I choose typing class since all my friends did. So I learned more typing unusual for a guy at that time mid 1980s.
Then IRC when I got onto the Internet in the early 1990s. You had to type very fast to get in a jab or a joke before someone else did.
Now I'm in IT and typing is ubiquitous.
Lesson one was learning A-S-D-F J-K-L-; and typing words and combinations on the home row, then we'd learn a few new letters each day. After that we had to learn how to use the tab function, address envelopes, and common forms for business letters. We were tested with "eyes on copy" typewriting where we didn't look at our hands.
(Other obsolete skills I learned in "Jr. High School" include how to set letterpress type, and Morse Code. I still use Morse Code today on amateur radio.)
Best class I took because of touch typing.
On the other hand, I have plenty of peers that type nearly as quickly using two fingers or simply by doing years of using a computer. People learn the layout with use. It is easy enough that switching from a standard American keyboard to a Norwegian keyboard (whose alphabet has 3 more letters in addition to some other European language letters and punctuation) was a non-issue.
FYI I didn't switch off of Dvorak because I was bored of it, I'd traded my left hand pain for right hand pain, and I decided it was a bit worse. Workman is more evenly split between hands where both qwerty and Dvorak had a major bias.
Workman also seems to beat Dvorak and Colemak in efficiency, but if that were my main concern, I also considered qgmlwb and Halmak, which IIRC are even better.
This assertion ignores crucial differences in the basic mechanics of typing in a standard QWERTY keyboard (i.e., look at the keyboard, press one key, get the desired character) and using a stenograph/chorded keyboard. A standard keyboard's discoverability makes it incomparably easier to ramp up than guessing which key combos get you a specific character combo/word.
I would think it takes a lot of time to get used, but seems like a smart approach for speed.
Here's what I personally use to test my keyboard setups: monkeytype.com.
My best is ~95 WPM and 100% accuracy.
Here's 163 wpm on a macbook keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ulK2VJdQpw
Here's 175 wpm on a custom mechanical keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO-A8rVJDOM
(I'm a fast typer, but not as fast as that one, also with long-ish --- around 0.050" --- fingernails.)
My speed gets a lot worse if I let them grow out, so I like to file them down regularly (instead of clipping them occasionally) to keep them at a length I'm used to.
Great for tiktok demo videos I guess.
> CharaChorder’s internal processor arranges the letters on-screen in real time faster than the human eye can perceive.
So if it inputs one word, deletes it, and writes a new word every time you press a new letter, that would result in some decreased accuracy, even if the user doesn't ever correct anything.
Well, CharaChorder won't exactly help with that...
Like you can take a look at their quick reference guide shown in the "coder" section of their website.
I don't know how well it will work but it looks viable.
The think I'm mostly worried about is that most human fingers (not thumbs) aren't really designed (or trained) for sideways movement. Does anyone has the necessary anatomy knowledge to know if this has a increased risk to cause health issues if used long term as the main keyboard?
It's not about how fast he's typing. It's about being able to say that his product is significantly faster than everything else.
No mention of Plover or http://www.openstenoproject.org
> have a computer program generate a predicted word
Do steno devices do this? This right there easily disqualifies it from competitions. It's like using the keyboard autocomplete. If you're using a machine to predict and correctly type the word for you, it defeats half the point of typing competitions, which is specifically about typing words without typos. The majority of time lost in these typing races is when you make a typo and have to go back to correct it.
Also, separately, I know HN skews more towards pogrammers, and I feel these keyboards wouldn't be very useful for that.
A normal person can barely "mentally process" that many words per second.
IMHO, 76% accuracy is honestly low. If the person has to sacrifice so much accuracy to hit 267 I'm not sure it's worth it. For most typing, making a mistake actually interrupts your thought process. This speed is only achievable/useful when there are text on the screen that you blindly retype.
This reads like a PR article.
So, 76% may also be an artifact due to the way the keyboard interprets inputs rather than something a user would need to correct.
The final text is 100% accurate--it's just what was typed by the keyboard wasn't 100% accurate.
Predictive tweaks aren't good in a keyboard, you want everything to be intentional, or you'll lose time and patience correcting things. Spellcheck should be post hoc imho.
Just depends on what kind of keyboard you're using and why. This is a very specialized keyboard for specialized tasks. I could see lots of different kinds of activities and roles it could be extremely useful for.
For programming, you probably wouldn't want it... though maybe some percentage of programmers who feel their brain moves a lot faster than their fingers might like it. Combined with stuff like Tabnine and Copilot, you hypothetically might eventually be able to "predictive-program" at an incredibly high speed. You'd inevitably have to spend some time revising bad predictions afterwards, but the total amount of time spent developing could decrease by a lot.
I don't even care if this is an ad. If it is, it worked and is the first and only ad I've appreciated. I've never impulse bought anything, but I'm buying this thing right now* after spending 10 seconds looking at it. (I used to spend a lot of time on online typing competition sites, so I'm closer to the target demographic.) My only concern is how much it might affect my normal typing muscle memory.
*As soon as it becomes available. Seems to be sold out, unsurprisingly.
But I prefer a regular keyboard. This doesn't make me a luddite or anything, mobile keyboards are objectively bad compared to regular keyboards.
You would know if it was a chord or not--not every word you type will be one.
BTW, if anyone from Alexa, Apple or Google is reading this, please have someone work on this. It's been 10 years since I've been using it, and neither speech recognition, nor autocorrect have made any kind of progress on the dual language stack.
Also amusing is that autocorrect, even while in English mode, suggests the bear emoji when I type "ours" or the cat when I type "chat".
Dictated not red
My main issue is when I type on the phone the text area is so small it scrolls out of view and the autocorrect puts the wrong stuff all the time. So I actually use voice to text a lot which gives you crazy phonetic sentences that end up being like weird poetry or GPT3 sometimes.
Some people said it was hard to read. So I now set the expectation that hey I'm out for a hike, so I'm not going to type. We can either do a phone call, we can do this later, or you can deal with the phonetic oddities. Usually people opt for the oddities.
That being said I notice my own mistakes much less when I'm in a slack type back and forth convo, I'm optimizing for speed not correctness. Whereas here I'm on a desktop on a 4k monitor with a text box the size of a google doc and taking my time.
76% accuracy doesn't sound so great to me, no matter how fast I can type on it.
Me: "yes, as a matter of fact I am"
Interviewer: "Whats 14x27"
Me: "49"
Interviewer: "that's not even close"
me: "yeah, but it was fast"
Shamelessly stolen, but yeah, 76% accuracy is only 3/4s of characters typed correctly; if that "works" you could probably just train yourself to not even type the lesser used parts of the alphabet ...
So if you type 100 characters and 24 of them are incorrect, the counted total is 100 - 10*24 < 0, independent of the test length.
This was in the time of typewriters; computerized text entry did exist but was certainly not ubiquitous. There was no real way to correct mistakes, so I can imagine typing correctly from the beginning was a bigger deal than it is now.
It is not a good way to measure "typing speed".
With such programs, the WPM score measures how many total times per minute you "finished" a correct word, including any time spent correcting the word; with the accuracy score measuring how much extra work was done, on average, doing those corrections.
stats
wpm - total amount of characters in the correctly typed words (including spaces), divided by 5 and normalised to 60 seconds.
raw wpm - calculated just like wpm, but also includes incorrect words.
acc - percentage of correctly pressed keys.
char - correct characters / incorrect characters. Calculated after the test has ended.
consistency - based on the variance of your raw wpm. Closer to 100% is better. Calculated using the coefficient of variation of raw wpm and mapped onto a scale from 0 to 100.
So, they assume the average word has 5 characters. Makes sense for computing wpm in random text.
Only in tests is there an option to check against what is expected. In the real world you could at most apply some dictionary and grammar checks, and we know those can go either way. Those tools don't know what you actually wanted to write after all, and still suggest without comprehension.
1. used a fuzzy autocorrect of the same kind mobile OSes and word processors have (not correcting to the known text, but instead only doing what such logic usually does — only attempting to correct words if they're not recognized as words; and only moving them to the lowest-Levenstein-distance match.)
2. treated words that are correct after autocorrection as being "correct", with no ding to accuracy.
Since accuracy is about how much extra time and effort the human typist has to spend to get the text correct, and since text that can be auto-corrected requires zero human time and effort to correct, it shouldn't really be considered incorrect.
Or, to put that another way: if I'm typing really fast on my phone's keyboard, and all the right words are ending up on the screen, what does it matter if I'm hitting the right keys with my thumbs? It's the WPM and accuracy of the cybernetic system composed of me + the auto-correct that matters.
In that sense, you can sort of think of an auto-correct as actually being a very similar thing to a stenographic keyboard (at least, in the hands of a person who knows how to take advantage of it): it's really a system to enable accelerated typing, by allowing you to key in the letters of a word out-of-order or simultaneously and have the word come out in-order.
I hated these ones so much in school because I'd be like 3 letters past the typo and reflexively hit backspace 4 times to get rid of the typo, which just registered as more mistakes because it had blocked those 3 additional letters and so would only accept 1 backspace.
(I'd already learned how to type from having to quickly enter chat messages in StarCraft multiplayer)
The real benefit to this speed/accuracy is that when writing long-form text, rather than say programming, the speed of typing can either match or exceed the thought process. There is a huge amount of utility in this approach and the keyboard becomes a true extension of the mind. I'm still waiting to find a good real-time auto-correct that doesn't screw with my flow at high WPM, I'd pay pretty good money to have something that just works out of the box.
On a practical note, I've considered trying to hit the numbers that the author claims, but I'm already so limited by my own train of thought. With the additional finger/wrist strain (And yes, there is _significant_ strain when these levels are approached for any length of time) I just don't see the costs making sense when everything can be fixed in just a few clicks after typing a great many paragraphs of text.
It's the same for me. I doubt I can hit 200 WPM, but when I'm typing what I'm thinking (like right now) I'm significantly faster than when I type something I've never read, especially if it's just random words. On the other hand, I've never been much into measuring my WPM (I can type sufficiently fast for everything I need), so I just assumed this was a skill one can train to actually get those insane scores.
Another story, when I was middle school, I took what I thought was a computer programming class that turned out to be a god awful typing class. Of maybe 30 kids, over half would completely fail to complete the assignment during the hour. The students that got through it were almost all my video game/computer geek friends. I personally hated the class as I thought it was a complete waste of time as I could already type fairly well. The carrot on the stick was that you could surf the internet, play games, whatever, if you completed the the assignment. Considering that the internet was wildly faster than my dial up line at home, I would burn through the class as fast as I could, literally always finishing before everyone else, spending 15 minutes tops on it.
Well, one day midway through the semester I overheard another student asking the teacher how I was always done so fast. This guy was a completely smug hard ass and was apparently a 'computer guy' prior to his teaching career. He had the gual to say it was only because I would make so many mistakes and that I was such a sloppy typists that I wouldn't be worth much to anyone later on. During the next class I made a point to hit 100% accuracy, declaring loudly to him so that the entire class would hear. I did that the entire rest of the semester, I loved it, he never showed his smugness towards me after that. Still really bugged me though, I realized even back then that computers were getting _good_ and handling typos, and that highly accurate typing was mainly for suckers.
As an aside, this was all during the era of the 'Ask Jeves's' of the world, I switched to google simply because it was so damn good at understanding the intent behind my typos. Incredibly, they're _still_ the only auto-correct I've used that understands and corrects the drifts!
What do you estimate your actual WPM to have been when you wrote your whole comment?
I find that it can take time to think about what I need to put down, and often need to edit and re-phrase for my audience.
The whole WPM thing focuses on pure technical ability and ignores that there is more to writing than being a stenographer.
Being a programmer probably allows me to be faster than a lot of other speed typers for specific tasks, but I'm nowhere near as fast as they tend to be for straight word counts where the numbers tend to look like 100% accuracy at 200+ WPM. As an example, I always set my text editors to backspace both words, and sentences (ctrl+backspace, and shift+backspace). This trick, jiggling, and good searching, allows me to move through code _much_ faster than most other programmers I've meet. The only exceptions have been people who've setup and mastered vim, (sorry emacs folks, I've just never encountered any of you in the wild) and I've been slowly been working on gaining proficiency there.
Another user pointed out that there is a zen mode for monkeyType, I'm trying it out on this post. I just sat down to write for the night and I'm using this as my warmup (going this fast requires it for me). I knew a good bit of what I've wanted to say as I started this post but there have been some pauses and edits.
MonkeyType claimed 72 for this comment, bit faster than I would have guessed, I'm curious as to how realistic that number really is!
If I type the word "hello" on my CharaChorder, I type the keys `helo` which Monkeytype will recognize as an inaccuracy. The CC's internal firmware then recognizes I typed helo and wanted hello and will backspace the word and replace it, much as if you did the same thing.
Do this on enough words where the chord trigger doesn't line up with the chord and you get the ~75% number.
But the final text is 100% accurate
I think someone else in comment thread mentioned that it comes preconfigured with 500 chords--these cover the 300 most common English word (some duplicate chords in case you prefer to hit them one way or the other).
It's up to you (or someone else if you import their library) to setup and configure different chords.
This is one of my least favorite parts about the product--it's advertised such that it seems like it is magical but really it is just like have a bunch of macros.
So in this case, you might have h+l to indicate hole, or h+o, or h+e--whatever is most comfortable for you. Hole is not configured out of the box so there is no way to chord it...but it is just like a keyboard in that you can just type it. You can type h, o, l, then e just like you would on a keyboard.
It's this mixing and matching of character entry + chording which makes the device pretty interesting.
The reddit community[0] has some helpful reviews and progress updates. And their discord server[1] is quite active with lots of helpful links and advice.
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/charachorder/ 1 - https://discord.com/invite/jMj6grUuBc
At the end of the article:
> Keen did not return Motherboard’s request for comment.
Since coding is 20% sitting in meetings, 50% reading code, 10% drawing on whiteboards or sticky notes, 15% drinking coffee, 4.5% fighting impostor syndrome and 0.5% actual typing, I think I am quite safe with my good 'ol QWERTY.
I also like using Sublime Text with vim keymap. I prefer the low latency of editors over features of big IDEs. Sometimes, I do use PyCharm or CLion for debugging since that experience in vim sucks. GDB is terrible in CLI.
For the remaining 95%… I’ve configured it to delay doing anything until 10000ms passes so it doesn’t get in the way
I don't think I've ever been in a job where I was limited by typing speed.
- communicating with peers over slack
- writing code / git commands
- writing email, comments in HN, documentation, etc.
- taking notes in meetings
- all the browser shortcuts
- all the CLI readline shortcuts
I feel like excessive swipe-typing with my thumb may have contributed more than typing to that; but I also play keyboards and it was scary for a second to have that affected.
I got myself a vertical mouse; will consider using another layout (which one do you use?). I do type at 75-80WPM (including time to fixe typos), can that really cause RSI?
I don't know if I'll be able to pull off even 20wpm with another layout, but looks like it's the next step. Thanks for suggesting it!
The exception to this might be spending time thinking about the very high level structure you want, since the initial structure you start with can lock you into pattern of trying to solve the problem that might not be the most effective.
1. It allows for minimal disruption to thinking process, close to 90% of the time even when coding is not actively typing, but when typing is subconscious and fast it removes the potential of where it interrupts the thinking process.
2. While this has no bearing on individual case (It would be Bayesian, some people consider that to be heretic), but a software engineer who does not type well have a greater chance of having had less practice.
Willing to dive into this a bit more? My personal experience is different so I figure this is a chance to learn something new. The subjective character of typing experience for me is like riding a bike, driving a car, walking, or speaking. That is to say that unless I'm mountain biking, off-roading, on a balance beam, or trying to say a tongue twister, for the most part I'm unaware of the intention-execution-results loop, and the intention-results loop is all that consciously exists. My paltry 50-60wpm doesn't feel like an impediment to putting thoughts into text, but maybe others feel differently.
Now, from a philosophical point of view, I believe that it's possible to have programming tools that allow a 60wpm user to program at the speed of a 120wpm user without those tools (e.g. autocomplete allows you to type 10-character identifiers with significantly fewer keystrokes) - I just haven't finished building them. That is, I believe that having a slow typing speed shouldn't impede programmers, but does with our current tooling.
That may be high enough that you don't have the impediment, but when you work with someone who types down around 10-15 WPM... You can definitely tell they're spending a lot of brainpower on hunt-and-peck instead of the problem they're actually trying to solve.
Basically there's diminishing returns on increasing WPM and you may be at or past the tipping point. I expect it'll be different not just for different people, but also for whatever they're currently working on.
I am not defending 10-15 WPM here ofc. just statingt that the majority of work happens before we start typing in code, and after we typed it.
Depends entirely on the individual developer. For me its think-think-think-think-drinkcoffee-think-type.
And after the first iteration, the typing to make changes is usually miniscule compared to the initial amount.
I always wish I could type faster and with less effort, or -- better yet -- just wish the code into the shape I want. ~100wpm touchtypist here.
This arguments wholly arbitrary. Maybe someone who types slowly will put a lot of thought into each word and create fewer bugs. Who knows? Why argue random claims you pull out of the air?
National Slow Talkers of America
I agree, and even wrote an article about that a few years ago. :-)
https://github.com/Dobiasd/articles/blob/master/how_touch_ty...
Also, you might be underestimating how dumb it looks to both technical and non-technical people when a highly paid engineer can barely type.
Not that I've seen many who type slowly, probably because that's something you just pick up after decades of work.
I am always surprised, though at this point I shouldn’t be, that there is always pushback against any attempts at improving the status quo when it comes to typing speeds on HN - as though the creator is attacking all of us with lower typing speeds personally…
From another perspective: sure you might speed up only 0.5% of your workday - but how is that a bad thing?
Repetitive stress injuries aside, even if you only spend an hour a week typing (I suspect it’s honestly more) then if you end up increasing your typing speed by double you’re still saving yourself 25 hours a year. Assuming my a career of 35 years that’s 875 hours and you increase your time fighting imposter syndrome by 0.25%.
Scale up as appropriate for how much time you actually spend typing.
I think most cases where you needed actual really fast typing were covered long ago and the number of careers or situations where a person needed it have been declining for a long time.
Most of the cases where you needed actual really fast travel have been covered for a long time and the number of careers or situations where a person need to travel fast have been declining for a long time, but I think we can all agree faster travel times are better.
Side note: stenography and chorded words with something like Plover (similar to the above) is where really fast typing usually comes into play for. I have not looked into any of the above because the pain of changing my habits hasn’t been worth the benefits to me yet.
I’ve considered it when I had to do interview transcripts, but ultimately I didn’t want to make the investment. I hope future generations are able to learn on something more designed for contemporary use than QWERTY and classic keyboards - I know my wrists have thanked me for moving to a split keyboard for the ergonomics alone.
I don't think it's a general attack because people are personally offended; most of the criticism right now seems to be that the headline claim is materially untrue. Rejecting snake oil is healthy and reasonable even if there's value to be found.
Edit: Perhaps more succinctly, people aren't pushing back against improvements, they're pushing back on deceptive claims.
The specific op I was replying to was saying
> …and 0.5% actual typing, I think I am quite safe with my good 'ol QWERTY.
And there were a host of similar comments initially.
100% on fighting snake oil. 0% on pushing back against people trying new things that might improve the status quo
Do you code with it as well, or is it primarily chat/browsing/etc?
I said I spend not a lot of time typing. Therefore, a device that is aimed at improving typing speed, has a low impact on my productivity.
I agree with this sentiment: > I said I spend not a lot of time typing. Therefore, a device that is aimed at improving typing speed, has a low impact on my productivity.
Though, setting aside that efficiency =/= effectiveness/productivity, I think the spirit of the article is that if a coworker is typing a lot, that may claim that their efficiency has increased greatly, not that every single person will see equal improvements.
FWIW: this is being typed with two thumbs on an iPhone because that’s as efficient as _I_ need to be right now ;)
It seems to be a common theme among tech people to unfairly extrapolate small, vaguely related things to judge big things, even to the point of rejecting job candidates or firing employees over one of them and then crowing about it on social media (for example the "don't hire losers" post a few days ago).
If someone doesn't like how I work, then don't watch me work. I get paid for the fruits of my work, not how I get there.
It’s unclear to me where this criticism is coming from.
> If someone doesn't like how I work, then don't watch me work. I get paid for the fruits of my work, not how I get there.
Similarly it’s unclear to me where there is anything about anyone measuring how you get your work done. That seems unrelated to the article at hand that only passingly mentions any work context (only of a co-worker making a claim about their own effectiveness) while spending most of the article on games and typing competitions.
I wonder how often Donald Knuth types.
And he is arguably among the 5 best coders in the world.
Most of the old wizards I worked with hunted and pecked, looking down constantly.
He typed slowly, not hunt&peck, but really slow compared to the other engineers.
Didn't matter. The guy was a wizard. Ever seen someone implement radix sort in assembly or debugging a microservice using nothing but nc and echo? Without looking up ANYTHING either in a book or online? That kind of guy.
Working with him, I sometimes felt like Mickey Mouse in that scene of "Fantasia: The Sorcerers Apprentice", when the Master came back, surveying the flood, and fixing everyting in seconds just by waving his hands imperiously :D
Depending of course if your meetings are necessary discussions, or just pointless constraints.
As someone who's somewhat familiar with eSports, I'm having a hard time imagining what game would let this style of keyboard provide a substantial advantage, and I'm very skeptical of these "online gaming competitions" he supposedly won.
I'm going to buy a CharaChorder now. I'm also a musician, so I'm really interested to see what types of functionality I could map, given the additional interface dimensions. However, I'll need to test the input lag, typically anything > 20ms is rather noticeable for live music; if they have esports as a target market, hopefully they've already accounted for that.
I type ~80WPM with 90%+ accuracy, but I don't find that typing speed is my blocker, rather the speed of a coherent thought. Maybe typing at ludicrous speeds will channel some deep stream of consciousness?
I agree with this, at least to some extent. If I'm rote copying something from a text (e.g., from a typing test website), I can achieve 130-140wpm easily. If I'm creating original thought or trying to actually compose a reply to someone, I think much slower than I can type. It takes a lot more effort to compose logical sentences that make sense on paper than it does to type them, in my experience.
What really makes me want to try these alternate input systems is the allure of being able to type while walking outside at speed, which is something I can't do on a smartphone. CharaChorder seems like it's nice on a desk, but the same could be said for a plain stenography keyboard/machine.
Yes, exactly this. I didn't expect the Tap Strap would be refined enough to serve this purpose (too much ambient motion) but I like to keep looking for something novel.
Weird. I have the opposite problem. I'm usually in the ~80-90 range typing something I'm reading. I find it way slower to read the text, the repeat it. But if I'm typing from my brain I'm way faster because I can skip the reading step.
In my case (which probably shares at least a few similarities to yours), I (a) have some tasks where I really do need to type fast (usually either when I'm transcribing my voice notes to text, or when I've already formed an idea into a sentence in my head and just need to get it out) and (b) have highly irregular rates of thought, where sometimes I'll have things I want to write at 300 WPM, and other times I don't have any ideas for minutes on end.
In the former case, faster is always better. In the latter case, while you might not be directly blocked on typing speed, it does allow you to get the typing out of the way faster, so that you can then move on to more thinking, or another non-typing action.
I’m on typeracer.com with an average typing speed of 154 WPM with 99% accuracy. I don’t find my thoughts to be limiting for typing purposes.
I just did the practice twice. Once at 100wpm (keyboard twister kind of text). Once at 130wpm (easy sentences). So much variation just from the practice text alone. This is also on a macbook pro keyboard literally on my lap - which I fucking hate and find horrible to type on and mess up on all the time. (I think it is also dysfunctional/semi-broken)
I don't think I could ever hit 150wpm. I just don't see how it's possible with a normal keyboard - at least for me. Never seen anyone do it sustained either. Must be some <1% skill - as I'm the fastest typer of just about anyone I've met and I don't feel fast.
Speed of thought is mostly the issue for me too though even at 130wpm. If I am saying things faster than that - whatever I am saying is probably not worth reading outside of a chat conversation.
I first learned to type in 1982 and that really accelerated when I got online in 1985. I did not touch type at that point - I just used 3 fingers on each hand. The first year I learned to touch type my typing instructor typed 60 WPM and I typed 75. Then it just went up from there after 4 years of formal typing instruction.
For what it's worth, I use a Das Keyboard mechanical keyboard.
Speaking as someone who can type in the 130-140 range and has gone over 200 in short bursts --- the keyboard makes a huge difference. Look for one with a low actuation force, short distance-to-actuation, and a "bouncy" feeling that helps your fingers return. I'm using a cheap no-name rubber-dome keyboard, but it's definitely on the softer side compared to most others I've used.
Unfortunately, the only searches on Google for its model number (KM-2601P) are the posts here where I've mentioned it on other keyboarding articles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24761580 (Don't you find it disturbing that a keyboard which was probably manufactured in the millions of units has literally only one person on the whole Internet mentioning it!?)
I also have a mechanical keyboard with clicky Blue Alps switches, which is impressively loud and satisfying to type on, but reaching 120 on that one is far more difficult; and I've also typed on a Thinkpad (pre-island style) keyboard, which has been praised as one of the best laptop keyboards, but maintaining even 100 on that one is very tiring --- it has far too much actuation pressure.
Even typing at 150 WPM (actually fast) is about the same speed as dictation. Anyone who's done extensive dictation knows how slow that actually is.
Typing commands or programming isn't so annoying though, because my speed of thought is slower then... Except for the occasional long commands such as 'sudo systemctl restart asterisk' or something.
So yes, I think there's a significant effect of diminishing returns on very high typing speeds, and I'd take a guess that it starts really kicking in at something not that high like 60wpm.
For other thinks I don't see this, not because I think slower then I type. But to some degree thoughts and typing are out-of-sync and while each though is faster then a typing, for much code you have one thought about how to type it, but also many more about contexts of your solutions and interaction with other code and what you do next etc. you type. And I don't think increasing typing speed would change this much. Except if I increase it to a point where I now need to fully focus on typing, which would be counter productive.
TL;DR: I type and thing, not type then think then type. (Though biologically seen I maybe don't do it actually in parallel but micro-task like how multi-threading on a single core non SMT system works, but it doesn't matter much for the end result.)
Hardware restrictions notwithstanding, if my keyboard driver/OS had convenient support for importing standardized maps that let me type `h-down, e-down, release` instead of “hello” I’d gladly (slowly) start using it
Then some people push it further with personalized dictionaries and TextExpander like extensions at the OS level. I am not sure how much a dedicated hardware device would be an improvement, at least it wouldn't warrant the learning curve and portability issues to me personally.
I'm still not convinced steno works well for code. One because I haven't seen a convincing example (all the examples I've seen were youtube videos where it's obvious someone's working hard trying to remember the inputs they just fed into their dictionary to produce a specific piece of code). Two, because I think code is by nature very different from natural language and you have to be extremely precise with every dash, underscore, capital letter and symbol, and there are lots of identifiers that are abbreviations or not natural words at all.
The long story: I have an undiagnosed disease/syndrome which, among other things, makes my fingertips become red and cold during winter season, and it gets worse when I'm typing. So in the summer I can pretty much type all day. It's not that my hands don't get cold while playing video games on my Playstation controller, they just get worst. I assume that the impact on every finger makes it worse, because I can wear all the layers of cloth in the house + have the air condition turned on and all I can get is my face and ears all red, but the fingers still cold as ice cubes.
From my standpoint, I see the potential use as an accessibility tool. If I can write words and avoid the step where my fingers suffer the impact of every keypress that's a big win for me. It's not like I can't type (obviously) but I'm wondering if I could train myself to code using something like this to avoid discomfort. I once entertained the idea of using my PS4 controller since Steam uses something similar.
To go gluten free, only eat foods that are certified gluten free. Anything with any kind of grain that is not certified likely has cross contamination.
However, if it's good for that, I will probably be buying one.
It sounds like it relies heavily on autocomplete, which means it's unlikely to be useful for coding instead of just English text.
Like the gesture for python's "create a for loop" would align with the english word "repeat" and in functional languages it might map to some manipulation that sets up recursion with a shortened list.
Actually coming up with a list of such a list of abstractions for app developers to map actions onto sounds like a dissertation for some psychologist somewhere.
i wonder how a trained stenographer on a chorded keyboard would compare to a trained typist with a good english language model backed autocomplete and a ui built for speed on a classic qwerty keyboard.
my understanding is that classic stenography is actually phonetic. so the chords match up to phonemes or phoneme like chunks which are then postprocessed to reconstruct english text.
a new approach using english language could be more data driven. a simple mapping could be one chord to one word with words sorted by frequency and easier chords assigned first. more complicated approaches involve chunking up the words into frequently used chunks and then doing the same.
code is harder, there are frequently reused strings, but they change from technology to technology. overall there is far more entropy in computing than english on a character by character level, so designing a chording scheme that is more efficient and isn't tied too much to a specific domain is actually a really hard problem, especially once you consider that the effectiveness of a given scheme is not only a function of how well it fits the problem (how often the user is actually entering things the scheme was designed for) but also how well users are able to learn the vocabulary of chords and the dexterity to execute them quickly.
If this works like swipe typing on phones, you'll type blazingly fast, but you have to retype each word several times until the AI finally guesses the right one.
So, no, it won't be typing "cadddr" for you in your Lisp code when you mash c, a, d, r. Probably, "card".
Of course it's banned from typing competitions; you're not actually typing the word; the algorithm is.
From the contest's point of view, it's morally equivalent to a regular QWERTY keyboard equipped with firmware that corrects typos.
According to its website, the device mentioned in the article basically serves as a device that does autocorrect on top of traditional chording, which is quite literally cheating in typing competitions.
This is normal for chording input devices. Both old-school stenography machines and modern steno software like Plover are context-sensitive to consecutive inputs.
When he got a new set of data to do entry on, he would develop custom data entry environment specifically for that data. He said it effectively gave him some large multiplier in typing speed, making a minimum wage job fairly profitable for him to do.
I don’t know, it’s a very philosophical question
On the other hand, it admittedly seems like it could be a nice development in consumer stenography. I'm only aware of open-source stuff like Plover, which I never got around to trying.
I admit that if the sensationalism and fake drama were stripped, the article would probably read like a product endorsement. So I guess me saying, "I'm OK with ads if they're cool" is itself a dumb defense.
Someone capable of decent touch typing on QWERTY will hardly benefit from the additional typing speed IMHO; at least not when factoring in the time spent learning, and the inevitable decrease of typing speed on QWERTY keyboards which will be very hard to avoid when working in a team or multiple locations.
Do you mean “improvising”?
Improvising musicians will almost certainly not sustain high note counts except in repetitive patterns. If you have an example that proves this wrong I would very much like to hear it ;)
I feel like this warrants its own article. Jumping from understanding but not being able to reliably speak words to chording without reading or letters in between sounds like a really interesting direction. Are the chords chosen to relate to orthography? To sound? To semantics? How would you teach it? A caregiver can easily demonstrate a sign. A chord is a lot less visually salient and harder to demonstrate.
Isn't this accuracy abysmal?
I wanted to start small with measuring real-life typing speed. And then work on two epics:
1. more aggressive Auto-Correct: why can you swipe "messy" on your phone and everything just works, all typos corrected fine, but the same doesn't work on PC?
2. typing technique trainer, webcam record your fingers and learn to use the right fingers for the right keys
Is anybody interested?
There's nothing wrong with this, and many of us probably use similar techniques daily (macros, shortcuts, etc.), but he's not typing 'words per minute' without computer help. So, makes sense it's considered 'cheating' for comparison purposes.
When you already feel the strain it's high time to do something against it, damage might already be done. Carpal tunnel or other inflammations are really painful and can take months to recover, during which your productivity will be quite low. Better to type only 40,000 characters a week and give your hands some rest, than squeeze 50,000 out of them until the damage is done.
The kind of people (like me) who got into Dvorak at that time would today probably learn something like Colemak DH, although there are many alternatives available nowadays and a big (discord) scene of folks optimizing and designing both their keyboards and the layouts they use on them.
I expect Dvorak will die with people like me, because anyone willing to switch away from Qwerty is probably better served by other alternatives.
The caveat to my perspective is that I don't care where hotkeys are. I minimize mouse use, and with both hands on the keyboard it just doesn't matter very much. I've used emacs and vim with both layouts. My faded recollection with respect to emacs is that it was equivocal, and Dvorak is actually a bit better for vim.
I also use it on my phone. Dvorak is terrible on swipe keyboards but I'm used to it.
It was annoying to learn but I forced myself to power though my initially slow typing speeds, and it was 100% worth it. I highly recommend it.
I'll sing its praises until the day that I die - but it does have disadvantages in that most applications design their keyboard shortcuts and other inputs around QWERTY users. On macOS I can use the Dvorak-QWERTY Command layout to deal with this in particularly annoying cases, but there's nothing comparable I've found on Windows or Linux and that doesn't help with things like Vi.
Not to mention I frequently find myself having to change layouts back in forth in games. A lot of games published even today have a nasty habit of using the character code instead of the keycode for keybindings, and I've gotten tired of redoing bindings in everything just to avoid pressing Windows+Space to change my layout. Additionally, since my keyboards still have a QWERTY layout of keycaps it makes it challenging when I get prompted to hit "Y" (which doesn't get used for important things usually as it's a stretch for the index finger from the ASDF position) and hit F by mistake since I look for the "Y" keycap on my keyboard - ditto when something prompts me to hit "F" and I hit "U" instead (basically the mappings between Q/' E/. F/U C/J V/K are easy enough as they're used often and are within natural reach, but once it goes outside these I start looking at keycaps and screw up).
Anyway, I'll always highly encourage people to give alternate layouts a try and I'm never going to stop - but I'd say there's nothing wrong with using QWERTY either.
This was in the early 2000s and I had to use a lot of Windows and Remote Desktop, so there were at least several incidents a week in which the keyboard would start making the wrong letters and I had to figure out why. It doesn't help at all that Windows' default layout-switcher switches using Ctrl+Shift so any key combo that includes that pair (including select-by-word!) will swap your keyboard layout too.
Sometimes I'd remote into a machine and after dozens of failed password attempts realize I was being treated to Double Dvorak, a much less well known layout in which the Qwerty -> Dvorak mapping is applied twice, due to the map being loaded both locally and remotely. This is all w/o third party software, literally nothing more than Windows just not coordinating with ... itself.
And finally, despite claims that Qwerty and Dvorak could be maintained at the same time, that wasn't true for me. The faster I got at Dvorak, the more speed and accuracy I lost on every other keyboard in the world I had to type on.
So now I'm typing this on Qwerty. It ain't as comfortable, but the number of hours I spend each week trying to get the computer to show which letter I'm pressing is now zero.
I switched to using copy and paste with the mouse with it since Cmd+c and Cmd+v are so hard to reach.
I don't use it myself - but on macOS there is a separate layout called "Dvorak - QWERTY Command" that shifts the layout to QWERTY when the command key is held to alleviate this issue.
That being said, I don't regret anything and Colemak is way more comfortable, for me. I never typed "properly" in QWERTY, I would use every finger on my left hand, but only two on my right hand. I started to notice some pain in my right hand and so I tried to retrain myself to type properly, but it never lasted more than a day because I was typing half the speed with proper technique. The only way I could force myself to use a proper typing technique was to just completely switch the layout.
When working in offices I'd have my company supplied keyboard still plugged in as a guest keyboard so others could work with me seamlessly.
This also came about as windows used to have the most ridiculous behaviour of setting the layout per window, so if you changed it when someone else came over you'd end up in typing hell. They thankfully fixed this to be a global setting a few years back.
Not saying that it's bought or anything, just that as a company focused on a value-delivering-product such articles are just awesome.
Especially when the article only focused on your good sites.
(No ideas about bad sites, but price ($250, not absurd for that market), compatibility with less usual hand-forms, and it not fitting well with a travel laptop setup (more size needed) are probably some).
I’d like to try it but not $200 like to try it.
I can't remember the name of it now. "Jaguar" is in my head, but I think I'm conflating it with the Atari console.
Well me, having grown up with computers, I was beyond proficient and in particular was quite a competent typist. Being an engineer at heart (lazy) I realized I could rig the system and be just fast enough each week to win but also faster than my classmates to remain on the leaderboard. The teach was thoroughly pleased with my weekly progress and applauded my efforts. All the while I was busy gaming (Nerf Arena, Quake) on a LAN with some others in the school who were "computer proficient".
ps: Ugg, vice.com. I don't care for them.
If it works half as well as the claim it would be an extraordinary advance. The issue is the length of time it takes to become proficient.
Which was a bit weird in a show about cybernetics with tons of direct mind links: why not just thinktype?
One of those interfaces I've always wanted to give a go, but never really invested the effort in trying.
Though the prospect of breaking a finger and being locked out of your computer as your unable to enter your password; Is one aspect of chord keyboards that would compound a stressful day.
And it was designed so that you can have them on your thighs and type whilst standing with arms at relaxed hanging?
I loved the idea of chorded-keyboards and I posted in the past about an engineer famous at intel for coding on them on his recumbant bike he would ride to the santa clara campus down san thomas expressway - connecting via a satellite phone and coding in binary in his head as he rode his boke and typed on these guys...
Long ago I learned the BAT one hand chorded keyboard. For one hand typing, I got to around 50 or 60 wpm - but only prose. It was much too slow for programming, as symbols and modifiers required their own chord plus the chord of the final character. But with two hands, or even some modifier key foot switches or a second chord hand (like the CharaChorder), it should be fine.
Stenography or other data entry are an exception, of course, but I'm guessing the intended audience for these pitches is the average joe who dreams of writing an email in seconds.
I use mouse a lot and don't feel like I really giving this habit up because the general ecosystem of apps you have to use if programming is not your primary job and terminal is not your primary environment is not particularly keyboard-friendly.
Does this device offer an efficient (perhaps something trackpoint-like) way to move your mouse pointer without moving your hand between it and the mouse?
It's clearly "cheating" in the context of a typing competition.
Due to the larger number of basic characters (46) Japanese smart phone input already uses flick-joystick like motions, with pretty amazing speed (for a smart phone). The 46 basic characters are input using 10 keys with 5 directions each: in (press), left, up, right, down.
Does CharaChorder support a press as well, or just left/up/right/down?
For instance there is a “kana” mode that let’s you direct input each kana with one keystroke only, which is way faster than romaji input, but is ignored by 99% of the population because the ROI on learning it is extremely low as you’re still converting to kanji at the end. To your point, a ten-key style input on desktop would probably be slower than kana input.
However, is it possible that ten-key style input could actually be faster than Kana input? After all, direct Kana input in Japanese is kind of equivalent to Roman input in English in the sense of one key = one character, but this keyboard claims to be faster than direct input due to not needing to move your fingers around. Couldn't the same thing be true for Japanese? In fact, for Kana input the problem of finger travel is even worse due to more keys = longer travel.
People tout a 30% speed increase over romaji: https://persol-tech-s.co.jp/i-engineer/technology/key-kana
> this keyboard claims to be faster than direct input due to not needing to move your fingers around
That would perhaps work if you remapped the movement to not be linked to romaji, but direct kana mappings. Then it's not just 26 keys combination for the alphabet alone, but 46+ more arrangement, and more for ° and ". With 10 fingers it feels like hell just for standard text input (to note, you can only use 9 for combination as you need a transformation key, and I guess you also need backspace and arrow keys ?), and you add to that punctuation etc.
I'm not sure there can be an actual human being effectively typing faster with this...
> That would perhaps work if you remapped the movement to not be linked to romaji, but direct kana mappings.
Yes, I picture the same 12 key basic input mapping as on smart phones. The CharaCorder has enough joysticks, but looking again at their website it doesn't look like it would work—seems like each joystick only supports 4 directions?... too bad.
That’s almost 18 tweets or SMS per minute. And I’ll bet that due to limitations of the human brain that if you tried to come up with 500WPM of content that it would have about the same quality and information density as 18 average tweets.
I guess if you were a stenographer or audio transcriber then maybe this is interesting.
I bet I press brackets more than "d", "f", "j", "k" - the best positioned keys in QUERTY
With this, I have it set such that the keys i o, and k l, are for curly braces and parentheses. My left hand holds down the trigger to swap layers and so that my right hand doesn't have to move much if at all to hit these keys.
We are still far from programming languages which can make reasonable use of such bandwidth though.
As for the underlying story, both sides are right. The chording device seems significantly better for text entry in terms of pure speed. But chording isn't typing, and it's typing, not text entry.
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It supports other character sets--have to join their discord and look to see which ones.
It's compatible with any system a keyboard would be. The OS doesn't know it's not just a USB keyboard.
Could even make both halves mobile so that I can use each one as an independent mouse.
Follow on question: does anyone know how court stenographer keyboards work?
Oof. That’s bad. No other mention of accuracy anywhere else.
I'm not sure I want to _use_ it, my experiments with chorded phone keyboards have uniformly been blah. But, I really like it and want to see people using it.
Just my 2 cents.
But effective! I may buy one just in case it works.
I'm usually thinking of other things at that time, since I just need to transcribe the words in my head, not think about them.
You've never had that with programming or other tasks? You think and figure out what to do, and then it's just a matter of getting the idea down on paper (or computer).
I notice that I can listen to rap and write code this way, but if I shift to trying to write a comment or a docstring then I just get stuck. Its like all English circuits are busy, please hold. But the effect goes away when I know the lyrics very well.