3 ms·

The website says it would be good for coders, but I'm skeptical; there are far too many particular characters that wouldnt translate as easily to steno as natur

The website says it would be good for coders, but I'm skeptical; there are far too many particular characters that wouldnt translate as easily to steno as natural language, not to mention the need for keyboard shortcuts to compile run etc.

suby 10y ago
I'm sure there are people out there who can make it work for programming, but I would strongly advocate against trying. I'm a programmer now, but before I got into programming I was on track to become a Stenographer. I wrote at length about this two years ago when there were a few articles on HN discussing the possibility of using Stenography for coding. http://www.danieljosephpetersen.com/posts/programming-and-stenography.html http://www.danieljosephpetersen.com/posts/programming-and-st... Negativity aside, I'm pretty thrilled to see Open Source projects in the field. It costs 4,000 dollars for Case Catalyst, which you can think of as Microsoft Word for Stenographers. It's worth it if you're a professional, but I suspect that the price is only that high because there's no competition. edit: In fact, I think the price might have gone up in the last two years. I could have sworn that it was 3,000 dollars back in 2014.
- stepvhen 10y ago
  dont get me.wrong i think it is a wonderful project, and i would def try it out, but i dont forsee much benefit for any programmers, unless youre writing pure sql or cobol, i guess
walrus 10y ago
There was a nice demo of using stenography for programming by one of the Open Steno Project developers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w
adwelly 10y ago
I'm a long term programmer and a very short term stenographer (over 20 years vs. 3 months). I'm cautiously optimistic that it could be a help with entering code given a correctly set up IDE. That said - I don't think the advantage is high speed entry of text. The speed of thought is the obvious bottleneck rather than typing speeds. Where there might be an advantage is that it might be possible to set up chords to do relatively complex structural manipulations of text and give that chord a useful phonetic name. The sort of thing that expert emacs users do almost as a matter of course. Learning emacs well would be a far more conventional approach of course but steno does offer the possibility of easier to remember commands (once you've understood and learned the phonetic system).

suby 10y ago

I'm sure there are people out there who can make it work for programming, but I would strongly advocate against trying. I'm a programmer now, but before I got into programming I was on track to become a Stenographer. I wrote at length about this two years ago when there were a few articles on HN discussing the possibility of using Stenography for coding. http://www.danieljosephpetersen.com/posts/programming-and-stenography.html http://www.danieljosephpetersen.com/posts/programming-and-st... Negativity aside, I'm pretty thrilled to see Open Source projects in the field. It costs 4,000 dollars for Case Catalyst, which you can think of as Microsoft Word for Stenographers. It's worth it if you're a professional, but I suspect that the price is only that high because there's no competition. edit: In fact, I think the price might have gone up in the last two years. I could have sworn that it was 3,000 dollars back in 2014.

stepvhen 10y ago
dont get me.wrong i think it is a wonderful project, and i would def try it out, but i dont forsee much benefit for any programmers, unless youre writing pure sql or cobol, i guess

walrus 10y ago

There was a nice demo of using stenography for programming by one of the Open Steno Project developers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w

adwelly 10y ago

I'm a long term programmer and a very short term stenographer (over 20 years vs. 3 months). I'm cautiously optimistic that it could be a help with entering code given a correctly set up IDE. That said - I don't think the advantage is high speed entry of text. The speed of thought is the obvious bottleneck rather than typing speeds. Where there might be an advantage is that it might be possible to set up chords to do relatively complex structural manipulations of text and give that chord a useful phonetic name. The sort of thing that expert emacs users do almost as a matter of course. Learning emacs well would be a far more conventional approach of course but steno does offer the possibility of easier to remember commands (once you've understood and learned the phonetic system).