As someone who has always been fascinated with alternative typing systems and shorthand, I took a look at Plover and Steno a couple of months ago. I bought myself an NKRO Keyboard - haven't turned it into a permanent STENO keyboard yet although I think that's the next step I should take if I want to be serious.
It seems difficult, but after about a week, you can write a lot of things without having to look them up in the STENO dictionary. The syllabic way of spelling words is systematic enough that you can derive most words, and there are multiple ways to spell something so most of your guesses are right.
Unfortunately, I think it will take (as said in the video) 3-6 months before I can go at a normal pace, and words not in STENO are not so easy to deal with. For any word not in the STENO dictionary, you either spell them out or generate a new set of chords for that word. So the system grows on you as you use it more and becomes more optimized and comfortable the longer you use it; it just takes a long time for you to become comfortable.
Steno keyboards also don't have arrow keys or modifier keys so you have to chord them out or remap all your shortcuts to things that make steno sense to you - that's even more of a learning curve.
I still really want to learn it; it is something that I think pays dividends after around 5 years or so. I would love to use it for stream of consciousness writing or note taking/transcription. Not sure about programming since there are so many tools (autocompletion, you can just write your own macros if you really want to save keystrokes) to help speed you up.
My impression from reading about steno is that a lot of the complexity in steno systems comes from disambiguating similar-sounding words. Have you found this to be the case?
If so I'm thinking predictive techniques could help.
While predictive techniques can help, you really want something that is accurate 100% of the time so you don't have to keep an eye on your output. I'd rather memorize two different chords to get 100% correctness on the I or eye problem rather than 99% correctness on it with a predictive engine - the fact that you have to keep track of what you're typing to catch its mistakes really makes predictive techniques not so good for speed.
Yeah, one of the things I love about steno (as opposed to predictive systems like voice recognition or autocorrect) is its 100% determinism. That tiny pause of hesitation to wait and see whether a word has come out properly is so completely disruptive of flow for me. In the most recent video, I basically did the whole thing just keeping my eyes on the text I was transcribing from, rather than watching my output. You can see me correcting a few errors, but that's because my fingers told me that I'd made one, which prompted me to look over and figure out what I'd screwed up. Otherwise I could trust that whenever I hit a stroke, it translated as the exact same thing every time, so I never have to keep hovering over my text watching for errors. It makes the whole process way more pleasurable.
It seems difficult, but after about a week, you can write a lot of things without having to look them up in the STENO dictionary. The syllabic way of spelling words is systematic enough that you can derive most words, and there are multiple ways to spell something so most of your guesses are right.
Unfortunately, I think it will take (as said in the video) 3-6 months before I can go at a normal pace, and words not in STENO are not so easy to deal with. For any word not in the STENO dictionary, you either spell them out or generate a new set of chords for that word. So the system grows on you as you use it more and becomes more optimized and comfortable the longer you use it; it just takes a long time for you to become comfortable.
Steno keyboards also don't have arrow keys or modifier keys so you have to chord them out or remap all your shortcuts to things that make steno sense to you - that's even more of a learning curve.
I still really want to learn it; it is something that I think pays dividends after around 5 years or so. I would love to use it for stream of consciousness writing or note taking/transcription. Not sure about programming since there are so many tools (autocompletion, you can just write your own macros if you really want to save keystrokes) to help speed you up.