Stenotype — the 200wpm minimalist keyboard you should have had 20 years ago
How fast can you type? 50? 70 words per minute? You know there are faster ways right? It’s possible to more than double that — up to 200 words per minute. With a stenographic machine that has 22 keys that look something like this..
Freaking weird, I know. But I think a QWERTY keyboard looked pretty weird to you the first time too, right? Now it is so embedded, so deeply in my mind, my fingers know better where the keys are than my visual imagination does. We could … we should have… done that with stenography instead. We could still do that by making support obligatory, not rare & let time slowly build those neurons among those who type. That’s it. That’s my point today. Make it supported by every device.
If you do a lot of typing, the speed of these things is such that you could seriously save a lot of time over the rest of your life — possibly years! Typing would no longer be a bottle neck — only the speed that you can form words in your head!
Let’s do a little calculation — a 500 word post takes 10 minutes at 50 wpm. At 200wpm it takes just 2.5 minutes. 7.5 minutes gained back for such a small post? A 30,000 word book takes 10 hours of constant typing to get drafted. At 200wpm that could be done before lunch. That’s not to say we should write MORE than we do, but we don’t need to spend so much at that stage.
& with just 22 or 23 keys, they can be more compact, more portable than even the most aggressively stripped back typewriter-like designs. Put them anywhere you can fit hands!
I’m interested. That’s appealing. But support is … rubbish. A single open source project — called Plover (that I can’t get to work on my maçhine ), and a handful of commercial n-key rollover keyboards (that I had to specially seek out).
Hold up, how does stenography work anyway?
This isn’t really an explainer post but here’s the short version: instead of single buttons for single letters, you use button combos for words & phrases. You know like [Shift]+[a] is Capital A & [Control]+[ALT] + [e] is É? That, but for whole words. All the time. Here’s a presentation by Mirabai Knight — a professional stenographer — if you want her version.
But how it works is not important right now. If you had one, you could learn it. But you don’t. Billions of people have learned to write because they had pencils and paper. Hundreds of millions of people (at least) learned to type in typewriter style because that’s what computers came with for decades now. Millions of people learned thumb typing and t9 prediction because that’s what phones came with. Make it ubiquitous. People will learn once they realise it can be twice as fast.
Of course there are other input methods like voice typing — fantastic developments have happened with that technology & I’ll talk a little more about it in the future. But they’re still proprietary, still less available, and they still fail on billions of people’s way of speaking & many ordinary tasks. When that failure happens, wouldn’t it be great to just reach over to the keyboard and keep going without slowing down at all. I can imagine it. I want it.
Please let’s make input faster! Let’s make a stenography option native to all operating systems and keyboards!
Bullet point version:
- Stenography — or typing words & phrases with button combos — is real, free, technology that could double or triple typing & computer interaction speeds.
- It is not a marginal improvement like layout adjustments such as DVORAK or the like (which have largely failed) but potentially transformational.
- To realise that potential, it needs to be included out of the box in as many devices as possible. Well signposted. It should be as easy as changing to any other layout, and the default hardware should support n-key rollover (button combos).
- A relatively small number of large companies (either on the supply or demand side) or a few governments could require this technology and availability could change for everyone rapidly. Just a few years is all it would take.
- QWERTY is fine to keep going with, but then if individuals or organisations feel constrained by typing speed, then they can more readily adopt this if it’s already there for them.
OK. Thank you for listening. I wonder if that makes sense today? Hope you have a good week and I’ll see you next time.
r :)
