Plover: Thought to Text at 240 WPM

Yes! Here is a really great talk on the state of doing so, with a fantastic realtime demo near the end. Mirabai live-codes using her Plover setup and narrates her thought process as she types out each command. ▶ this video

Mirabai Knight's talk about this is one of my all time faves: ▶ this video Inspired me to try to create a live coding musical instrument based on it: link / link

Over the past decade there have been some interesting discussions about Plover on HN link The video in the first result was good: ▶ this video

I personally like ibm tts slightly more than Google although it is more expensive. I think Google, but definitely other startups also allow you to train the model to be closer to your voice. Since you might have many recordings of yourself before this, could be cool. Comment if you can't find it and I can look It's none of my business how long term it is, but if it is long term look into stenography, especially open source opensteno and plover. Old talk but ▶ this video It's what court reporters use to transcribe at the speed of text but for you it could mean giving text into a tts software at the speed of normal talking. I've only tried it briefly but if you take the time to learn it, you can comfortably get to normal speech speeds with no hang fatigue. It's one of the reasons opensteno is so nice bc it also has cheap steno keyboards which are normally thousands and locked behind industry. Comment if you want more links! I can add when I'm by my computer

Here's a good PyCon presentation from someone who switched to voice input for programming. ▶ this video I hadn't thought about it until this thread, but one of the biggest barriers for me using it was that we have a really quiet open office, but now that we are WFH...

Court reporters are required to type at 240WPM with zero mistakes, or they lose their court reporting license. You can teach yourself to use a stenography machine. You can build your own steno machine with some open-source software and a fancy gaming keyboard. See this video by Mirabai Knight and the Plover project: ▶ this video I wanted to try this but I couldn't stick with it.

Stenography might also be an option: link Here's a video by the stenographer half of the duo that started the project: ▶ this video

There is an open source stenography project called "Plover". The idea of stenotype is instead of typing individual letters one combines keys to form sillables (or commands), what makes typing blazingly fast (240 WPM in the video below) and is overall a less cramped movement, because after each sillable you can relax instead of keeping muscles tensed for each letter. link Talk: ▶ this video Demo: link

It honestly surprises me that the evolution of ergonomic keyboards has been so slow. Sure, we have plenty of split keyboards now, but we don't have any commercially available DataHand-like designs [1]. Watch someone type with a DataHand you'll see that they barely need to move their fingers at all [2]! The best similarly ergonomic designs we have at the moment are a gaming keypad [3] and some DYI projects [4]. [1] link [2] link [3] link [4] link see also link ---- On another note, does anybody know how good steno keyboards tend to be for RSI issues in the long run? I've practiced some steno with a regular keyboard (thanks to plover [5] and Typey Type [6]), but I'd need an actual steno keyboard to continue since I don't have N-key rollover on my current keyboard. The Georgi [7] seems like a good option and I'd imagine that it would be pretty good for ergonomics since it's a split design and also rather small. The only problem is that I'd have to learn steno which will likely take quite some time. Here's a demo of someone writing code with a steno keyboard (54 keystrokes needed vs 143 if you were using QWERTY) [8]. [5] link [6] link [7] link [8] ▶ this video

If you really want to take the "Learn to type fast" advice to heart you can get a Georgi keyboard [1] and spend a few months learning stenography [2]. That can get you typing at above 200 WPM! (but it does require a significant amount of time to learn) [1] link [2] ▶ this video

> I imagine writers have it even worse than programmers. Well, I dunno about that. One of the major projects I'm currently working with, has over 130K lines of Clojure (tests excluded), and that is not too big of a project. I'm too lazy to figure out the proper way to count "words" in that project `wc` shows over 5M. In comparison - "War and Peace" [technically] is ten times smaller. Programmers do type a lot. Possibly, way more than writers have to. And that's just code. Have you ever thought about how much typing happens outside of coding? When reviewing PRs, replying to emails, etc. That is why every single programmer must invest into choosing the right keyboard; learning how to maintain a proper posture; maybe learn non-traditional ways to input text - Vim and Emacs keybindings; try Stenographic input¹; Speech recognition², etc. Because when they don't - sooner or later they end up having problems: back and neck pain, headaches, RSI, hemorrhoids. --- ¹ ▶ this video ² link

There actually is a modern (almost) equivalent of the DataHand called the Azeron gamepad [1], and there are some DIY 3D printed DataHand replicas too [2][3]. If you want to type really fast (>200 WPM) and don't mind a VERY steep learning curve, then getting a $95 Georgi keyboard [4] and learning steno [5] is probably the way to go. [1]: link [2]: link [3]: link [4]: link [5]: ▶ this video