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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat hilariously, having perused your first two links, and followed the link from Sweep to Ferris, I still find myself having no idea how any of this works. (But I know a lot about how the firmware and PCB layout is designed!).

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I have a charachorder. It's similar to music theory where you can hit individual notes to make up a chord. With chording you hit multiple keys usually that are part of a larger word and it outputs the associated word. This means instead of having to hit every individual key in sequence to type out a phrase one character at a time, you hit multiple keys at once to output words at a time. In the time it takes to output a single character on a keyboard someone on a charachorder did the entire word already. The longer the word the more speed is gained from this. It takes a lot of time to learn though, like a solid month of practice just to get near speeds I have with normal keyboard. Significantly helps with hand strain from typing all day due to requiring far less hand movement.

Is that language specific then?

I would imagine that programming languages need another vocabulary and you will also need to deal with LongVariableNames, delimiters, tabs etc.

Yes, it lets you define custom chords to suit your needs and languages.

Thanks for the explanation! I always wondered how stenographers do this.

I still find it pretty humorous that I can't really find any of that information on how this works on these websites. There must be an intro somewhere that they could link to!

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