53 ms·

Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

630 points by zdw 5y ago

sydthrowaway 5y ago
In the far distant future, supertypers will use prescience to achieve 10000WPM, like guild navigators
- betsydupuis 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29816098#29847333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29816098#29847333 Please refer back here and notice the bias that the thread has taken against me as a sexual assault victim. The thread has been hijacked with gaslighting and victim blaming, name calling, and unsubstantiated claims including unknowable thoughts on me. Please contact hn@ycombinator.com to support removing this thread if they admins can't apply policy in an unbiased way.
xg15 5y ago
> Instead of typing h e l l o, a chorded typer mashes h, e, l, and o to produce the word. With practice, it’s much faster If this works like swipe typing on phones, you'll type blazingly fast, but you have to retype each word several times until the AI finally guesses the right one.
- JCharante 5y ago
  Even better, you have to create a keyboard shortcut for each word.
blacklion 5y ago
And what is about another (non-English) languages? Or not natural languages at all? Looks like chorded mode is useless for anything but natural English text. And I'm doubt, that it can be easily adapted to non-English layouts even in "char per char" mode.
tombert 5y ago
Has anyone tried this with coding? It looks like this is very focused towards writing English, which is fine, but as someone who spends a good chunk of my day around code editors, a keyboard that is crap for code editing is a non-starter. However, if it's good for that, I will probably be buying one.
- rappatic 5y ago
  He posted an earlier video on his TikTok account showcasing the device's coding capabilities. I don't know if the videos he posts are entirely reliable (eg. as another commenter mentioned, he claimed a 500 wpm typing speed by typing one memorized sentence). I do know that it needs autocorrect (built-in) to work at high WPM which doesn't seem great for coding which might use nontraditional words and spellings. Personally it seems like it would be too great a learning curve for not enough benefit, given that no software is designed for devices like these. Maybe if this somehow takes off in the future.
  - tombert 5y ago
    I'm gonna bite the bullet and buy one, I think. I'm ok with a "good enough" coding experience, and I never bought myself a Birthday/Xmas present last year. This will work.
- ekimekim 5y ago
  > chorded typing allows the users to input several letters at the same time and have a computer program generate a predicted word. Instead of typing h e l l o, a chorded typer mashes h, e, l, and o to produce the word. It sounds like it relies heavily on autocomplete, which means it's unlikely to be useful for coding instead of just English text.
  - cwp 5y ago
    No, that means it's likely very useful for coding instead of English. You just need a custom dictionary. Code has a smaller vocabulary than prose, even with the domain-specific words that get used as identifiers . You could probably do pretty well with a dictionary that just has all the keywords in your favorite language, plus some common variable names. Heck I bet it'd be a win just to make the punctuation used in code have convenient chords.
Dig1t 5y ago
All of this seems like an advertisement. It does seem pretty cool though if you have a need to be able type a lot of text really fast; I don't think most programmers need to type fast though. My daily work as a programmer is like 5% typing code and 95% talking to people and thinking about things.
ghostly_s 5y ago
The picture up top is upside down..
prirun 5y ago
"he did win another typing competition using the CharaChorder to hit 267 WPM with 76% accuracy." 76% accuracy doesn't sound so great to me, no matter how fast I can type on it.
- thepete2 5y ago
  Yes, that's terrible. The finished text was not corrected in that time, was it?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- zeckalpha 5y ago
  It depends on how it is calculated. If that is one in four key presses vs one in four words it is very different
- bombcar 5y ago
  Interviewer: "I heard you were extremely quick at math" Me: "yes, as a matter of fact I am" Interviewer: "Whats 14x27" Me: "49" Interviewer: "that's not even close" me: "yeah, but it was fast" Shamelessly stolen, but yeah, 76% accuracy is only 3/4s of characters typed correctly; if that "works" you could probably just train yourself to not even type the lesser used parts of the alphabet ...
  - malshe 5y ago
    Thanks for the chuckle!
  - cafard 5y ago
    Back in the manual typewriter days, every typo subtracted 10 WPM from your score. (Source: my junior-high typing class.) It seems to me that 76% accuracy would put you into negative WPM by that reckoning.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
58x14 5y ago
I'm fairly obsessed with alternative HIDs. I bought the Tap Strap 2 but never broke past the initial learning curve. I'm going to buy a CharaChorder now. I'm also a musician, so I'm really interested to see what types of functionality I could map, given the additional interface dimensions. However, I'll need to test the input lag, typically anything > 20ms is rather noticeable for live music; if they have esports as a target market, hopefully they've already accounted for that. I type ~80WPM with 90%+ accuracy, but I don't find that typing speed is my blocker, rather the speed of a coherent thought. Maybe typing at ludicrous speeds will channel some deep stream of consciousness?
- Shank 5y ago
  > I type ~80WPM with 90%+ accuracy, but I don't find that typing speed is my blocker, rather the speed of a coherent thought. Maybe typing at ludicrous speeds will channel some deep stream of consciousness? I agree with this, at least to some extent. If I'm rote copying something from a text (e.g., from a typing test website), I can achieve 130-140wpm easily. If I'm creating original thought or trying to actually compose a reply to someone, I think much slower than I can type. It takes a lot more effort to compose logical sentences that make sense on paper than it does to type them, in my experience. What really makes me want to try these alternate input systems is the allure of being able to type while walking outside at speed, which is something I can't do on a smartphone. CharaChorder seems like it's nice on a desk, but the same could be said for a plain stenography keyboard/machine.
  - 58x14 5y ago
    > type while walking outside at speed Yes, exactly this. I didn't expect the Tap Strap would be refined enough to serve this purpose (too much ambient motion) but I like to keep looking for something novel.
  - NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    >If I'm rote copying something from a text (e.g., from a typing test website), I can achieve 130-140wpm easily. Weird. I have the opposite problem. I'm usually in the ~80-90 range typing something I'm reading. I find it way slower to read the text, the repeat it. But if I'm typing from my brain I'm way faster because I can skip the reading step.
caslon 5y ago
Chording input devices hardly count as keyboards. It's not even that it's fast, it's that it's an entirely different paradigm of input. Stenography is an entirely different skillset than typing. According to its website, the device mentioned in the article basically serves as a device that does autocorrect on top of traditional chording, which is quite literally cheating in typing competitions.
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  > article basically serves as a device that does autocorrect on top of traditional chording This is normal for chording input devices. Both old-school stenography machines and modern steno software like Plover are context-sensitive to consecutive inputs.
umvi 5y ago
The "500 WPM" video is a little suspect. He types literally one memorized sentence and extrapolates a WPM from that one 10 word sentence. I'd like to see him actually type 500 meaningful words in under 60 seconds. Anyway, this is cool but basically just a modern stenography device. Steno has a learning curve problem that makes it so most people won't use it.
- ouid 5y ago
  well that and the fact that this is transparently an advertisement masquerading as journalism.
- tambourine_man 5y ago
  QWERTY has a steep learning curve as well, it’s just that it’s so ubiquitous that most people don’t question or remember the work that was put into.
  - globuous 5y ago
    Yeah, I switched to Dvorak a few years back, it was the worst experience in the world. Granted I had to fight against my qwerty reflexes
    - snuxoll 5y ago
      I was lucky to never have properly learned to touch type on QWERTY in the first place, I had key positions memorized but I always used my index fingers - it actually hindered me from touch typing as the bad habit would always creep back up. Thus I forced myself to learn from square one with Dvorak, not having the keycaps on my keyboard to fall back on - it was painful, but I'm glad I did it. Now 15 years later I really enjoy the flow of the layout, a majority of the time when typing you alternate between sides of the keyboard when typing and it just feels good.
    - nthdeui 5y ago
      When I learnt to touch type I switched to Dvorak at the same time. I liked the idea of improved efficiency but whenever I had to use someone else's computer or they needed to use mine it was too much hassle. Once I'd relearned to touch type with Qwerty life was so much easier. Also hjkl with Vim using Dvorak was just too hard to get my brain around
torpfactory 5y ago
I don’t think my problem is being able to get the words from my brain into the computer fast enough. My typical HID use case is composing meaningful written communication, a process which is unfortunately much slower than 500wpm.
- Dumblydorr 5y ago
  Yeah. The sheer amount of button presses to write a 1k line script? That'd be roughly 10,000 words let's say, so 500 wpm would bang that out in a mere 20 minutes. Meanwhile the thoughts to compose 1k lines of code? That could take weeks of reasoning to deduce the proper logic.
  - jcrawfordor 5y ago
    These days I type at about 80-90wpm which is not as fast as I once could (there was a point where I could achieve 130wpm on Dvorak but I was both younger and had less of a life). As is, though, it's very noticeable that I can type faster than I can actually compose text. I've also found that typing very fast tends to lead to a much higher rate of what I call "wordos," in which you mistype by completely swapping a word with another or omitting a word... these feel like symptoms of a sort of "buffer underrun" when typing that doesn't get noticed because I'm already having to move on to composing the next sentence. So yes, I think there's a significant effect of diminishing returns on very high typing speeds, and I'd take a guess that it starts really kicking in at something not that high like 60wpm.
- jhauris 5y ago
  I consider typing speed the I/O of the operation. Sure there's some processing time while you think of what to type, but regardless of how long that takes, typing will slow it down further. I'm not perfectly parallelized in thinking/typing pipelines.
  - nepeckman 5y ago
    I agree with the analogy, but for me (and I think most people) processing time far exceeds IO. Once you get to a good enough IO speed, it doesnt make sense to optimize further, as the returns are diminishing.
jtsiskin 5y ago
Fascinating. This is the first article I’ve read where the source is exclusively tiktok videos
- jedberg 5y ago
  And Discord.
- amelius 5y ago
  After reading only the headline, I'm not surprised.
- kmlx 5y ago
  Keen, CEO of the keyboard company, is mentioned several times. At the end of the article: > Keen did not return Motherboard’s request for comment.
- ycIsGarbage 5y ago
- Xevi 5y ago
  That's because pretty much all of their promotional content is short TikTok videos.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Cool but who needs this? I'd rather see a keyboard that limits you to 10 WPM so you are forced to think before you type
- AlexCoventry 5y ago
  Sometimes it's useful to be able to run a series of quick experiments, each based in some complex way on the outcome of the previous ones, to develop an empirical understanding of how something is working.
- maxbond 5y ago
  I've never completed the leap to a chordal interface, but my interest in them is about ergonomics, not speed. For instance, a habit I had to break to avoid hurting myself on the keyboard was rotating my hands to reach a key. This is simply not a problem on chordal keyboards.
  - wly_cdgr 5y ago
    The ergonomics angle is a good one, I failed to consider that
- ars 5y ago
  Not everyone thinks while typing. I do all my thinking ahead of time, then I just need to record it on the screen after I'm done. I'm usually thinking of other things at that time, since I just need to transcribe the words in my head, not think about them.
  - gowld 5y ago
    How much text do you memorize before you type a round?
    - ars 5y ago
      It's not a specific amount, and it's not memorization of specific words, it's more like assigning a sub-processor the task of converting the ideas into typing, while the main brain moves on to other things. You've never had that with programming or other tasks? You think and figure out what to do, and then it's just a matter of getting the idea down on paper (or computer).
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Back in the 90's I worked with a guy who used a Dvorak. Any fans still out there?
- tombert 5y ago
  I tried learning Dvorak about 9 years ago, and I got good enough for IMing and emails and whatnot, but I found it extremely difficult to context-switch between coding-editor keystrokes and conversational keystrokes. I know it has its fans, but I could never really get the hang of Vim with Dvorak, and I also didn't type any my emails any faster than I was with QWERTY, so I abandoned it and haven't tried Dvorak since.
- warp 5y ago
  Yup! I learned Dvorak probably in 1999 or early 2000s (and I have a coworker who also still uses Dvorak). The kind of people (like me) who got into Dvorak at that time would today probably learn something like Colemak DH, although there are many alternatives available nowadays and a big (discord) scene of folks optimizing and designing both their keyboards and the layouts they use on them. I expect Dvorak will die with people like me, because anyone willing to switch away from Qwerty is probably better served by other alternatives.
  - jasone 5y ago
    I disagree with your assessment that Dvorak has been obsoleted by other layouts. I used Dvorak 1998-2001, and again since 2018. Before I re-learned it in 2018 I did a bunch of research on Colemak, Workman, and the rich set of other optimized layouts people have created this century. There are compromises in every layout, and I came to the conclusion that Dvorak was within spitting distance of minimally pessimal, other named layouts less so. The caveat to my perspective is that I don't care where hotkeys are. I minimize mouse use, and with both hands on the keyboard it just doesn't matter very much. I've used emacs and vim with both layouts. My faded recollection with respect to emacs is that it was equivocal, and Dvorak is actually a bit better for vim.
- panda888888 5y ago
  I've used Dvorak for more than 15 years and love it. I'm "fluent" in QWERTY too but am faster in Dvorak. I also use it on my phone. Dvorak is terrible on swipe keyboards but I'm used to it. It was annoying to learn but I forced myself to power though my initially slow typing speeds, and it was 100% worth it. I highly recommend it.
SubiculumCode 5y ago
typing speed is rarely the limiting factor on productivity. HN can be though. get back to work.
- passivate 5y ago
  Agreed, I don't think editing text has ever been a bottleneck for developers at any point of time. The vast majority of time is spent on reading, thinking, discussing, explaining, and debugging code. This is also why I rue the time I wasted learning vi.
DrBoring 5y ago
I wonder how effective this CharaChorder is at preventing RSI (repetitive stress injury). It still seems to have the same flaw as QWERTY in that it requires you to use your small finger muscles, which are more prone to RSI than say your biceps. ps: Ugg, vice.com. I don't care for them.
- ghostly_s 5y ago
  twitching your fingertips left and right seems like a terribly unnatural repetitive motion to me, I would be concerned.
  - MandieD 5y ago
    As a flute player who has experienced my right pinky locking up after passages involving moving between the footjoint keys, you're right to be concerned.
pipework 5y ago
This reminds me of the speedrunning community ‘any percent’ ladders and how anything goes to get to the finish. Such a grind, but very specific applicable knowledge, and no meaningful generalizable growth at the end to bring to another game.
Dumblydorr 5y ago
That thing isn't really a keyboard is it? It doesn't have keys and it isn't a board. It's more a joystick controller.
- xondono 5y ago
  Those joysticks do have switches at the ends (that click) though… I don’t know, it’s a very philosophical question
rkagerer 5y ago
I'm more curious what the ergonomics are like on this device and how it compares to keyboards like the Kinesis Advantage for preventing injuries.
abeppu 5y ago
> Keen is experimenting with a modified version of the device that he thinks might even allow babies to type and communicate similarly to the way some babies communicate with sign language. I feel like this warrants its own article. Jumping from understanding but not being able to reliably speak words to chording without reading or letters in between sounds like a really interesting direction. Are the chords chosen to relate to orthography? To sound? To semantics? How would you teach it? A caregiver can easily demonstrate a sign. A chord is a lot less visually salient and harder to demonstrate.
aaronscott 5y ago
I looked into buying one a few weeks ago but ultimately decided not to move forward. One reason was that it comes with a pre-configured list of 500 chords, so it's up to users to create their own beyond the initial list. The other was that the build quality doesn't appear to be that great (with the PCB board clearly visible). The reddit community[0] has some helpful reviews and progress updates. And their discord server[1] is quite active with lots of helpful links and advice. 0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/charachorder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/charachorder/ 1 - https://discord.com/invite/jMj6grUuBc https://discord.com/invite/jMj6grUuBc
- jeofken 5y ago
  FYI links to reddit do not work if user is not logged in - at least on mobile. Sad to see its decline.
  - andrewxdiamond 5y ago
    old.reddit.com still works https://old.reddit.com/r/charachorder/ https://old.reddit.com/r/charachorder/
  - mgerb 5y ago
    On mobile replace the “www” with “i” to get something that actually works on a phone. The new mobile site is such horrible user experience in almost every way.
    - Nition 5y ago
      For the lazy: https://i.reddit.com/r/charachorder/ https://i.reddit.com/r/charachorder/
mhb 5y ago
...he did win another typing competition using the CharaChorder to hit 267 WPM with 76% accuracy. Isn't this accuracy abysmal?
- jjice 5y ago
  If my accuracy was 76%, I'd be upset. I'd definitely work on accuracy over raw speed at that point.
- angio 5y ago
  Yes, IIRC stenographers in the US are required to type 225 WPM with 98% accuracy.
usrbinbash 5y ago
>You may soon see that coworker with the weird monolith style trackball mouse rocking this strange peripheral and claiming he’s upped his efficiency in ways you can’t possibly imagine. Since coding is 20% sitting in meetings, 50% reading code, 10% drawing on whiteboards or sticky notes, 15% drinking coffee, 4.5% fighting impostor syndrome and 0.5% actual typing, I think I am quite safe with my good 'ol QWERTY.
- gowld 5y ago
  You type a lot more than 0.5% of the time.
  - bastardoperator 5y ago
    I'm typing even less these days with tools like copilot.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      For some reason I don’t like any of this automation tools. I find VSCode unbearable even without copilot. Too many things happen when I type. I prefer linting and that’s about all I want to write my code peacefully. I use vim in iTerm and it’s all I ever need. Jump off to Pycharm to debug if needed.
      - bastardoperator 5y ago
        I use vim quite a bit too, just sayin... https://github.com/github/copilot.vim https://github.com/github/copilot.vim
        systemvoltage 5y ago
        Oh boy..., I guess there are people who find this useful. I respect "To each their own" and "You do you". I also like using Sublime Text with vim keymap. I prefer the low latency of editors over features of big IDEs. Sometimes, I do use PyCharm or CLion for debugging since that experience in vim sucks. GDB is terrible in CLI.
xhevahir 5y ago
The idea of typing 500+ words a minute sounds silly to me. If you're writing in a natural language and you can touch type reasonably well, your typing skill is not going to be the bottleneck. Your speed at putting things into words is. Stenography or other data entry are an exception, of course, but I'm guessing the intended audience for these pitches is the average joe who dreams of writing an email in seconds.
mjh2539 5y ago
Is this wireless? I've always thought it would be cool to be able to walk and type at the same time. I always seem to get great ideas while walking and it's tedious having to stop and write them down.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Is there any reason you wouldn't use a standalone pocket sound recorder, or alternatively the sound recorder app on your phone?
- mminer237 5y ago
  I always just dictate a note in Keep on my phone. I don't think there's a more effective mobile note-taking system.
seagoj 5y ago
I could see this for prose, but this seems all but useless for programming. Even if you combined it with copilot or something I think the time you'd spend fixing what it presented would make you slower in the long run.
TulliusCicero 5y ago
> Keen also claimed that he’d won several online gaming competitions using the CharaChorder, which he says brings up an interesting ethical dilemma. “I’m not sure if there’s any restrictions on what keyboards you’re allowed to use,” he said over a video of him playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on the Nintendo Switch, using his CharaChorder running through a XIM-style adapter. As someone who's somewhat familiar with eSports, I'm having a hard time imagining what game would let this style of keyboard provide a substantial advantage, and I'm very skeptical of these "online gaming competitions" he supposedly won.
- ericschn 5y ago
  There has been conversation happening regarding tournament play legality of digital input controllers for the Smash Bros games, most notably Super Smash Brothers Melee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smash_Box_controller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smash_Box_controller
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    Yes, but things like regular keyboards, or hitboxes already exist. How does this new thing improve on those?
- ericpruitt 5y ago
  Check out https://youtu.be/Lw1tcqbFwN4?t=867 https://youtu.be/Lw1tcqbFwN4?t=867 which talks about some of the advantages of stickless controllers. That link points to a particular timestamp, but the video as a whole is pretty interesting IMO.
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    I'm aware, I just don't see how this would provide an advantage over already existing methods like hitboxes, or regular keyboards.
    - ericpruitt 5y ago
mpwww 5y ago
Looking at the CharaChorder Lite version — can’t this be done via software implementation with a n-key rollover keyboard? I’d like to try it but not $200 like to try it.
- maximus-decimus 5y ago
  I agree. It really feels like it should be a PLOVER dictionary.
stakkur 5y ago
> "Chorded typing allows the users to input several letters at the same time and have a computer program generate a predicted word. Instead of typing h e l l o, a chorded typer mashes h, e, l, and o to produce the word. With practice, it’s much faster" There's nothing wrong with this, and many of us probably use similar techniques daily (macros, shortcuts, etc.), but he's not typing 'words per minute' without computer help. So, makes sense it's considered 'cheating' for comparison purposes.
anigbrowl 5y ago
Hmm, finally a chording device that doesn't look like total BS. I'm unwillingly intrigued. As for the underlying story, both sides are right. The chording device seems significantly better for text entry in terms of pure speed. But chording isn't typing, and it's typing, not text entry.
xyoxyoxto 5y ago
xyoxyoxto 5y ago
dathinab 5y ago
This is probably the best advertisement they could get ;=) Not saying that it's bought or anything, just that as a company focused on a value-delivering-product such articles are just awesome. Especially when the article only focused on your good sites. (No ideas about bad sites, but price ($250, not absurd for that market), compatibility with less usual hand-forms, and it not fitting well with a travel laptop setup (more size needed) are probably some).
samstave 5y ago
UH, you guys dont recall that this keyboard came out in the 80s? And it was designed so that you can have them on your thighs and type whilst standing with arms at relaxed hanging? I loved the idea of chorded-keyboards and I posted in the past about an engineer famous at intel for coding on them on his recumbant bike he would ride to the santa clara campus down san thomas expressway - connecting via a satellite phone and coding in binary in his head as he rode his boke and typed on these guys...
periheli0n 5y ago
Maintaining such typing speeds look like a recipe for burnout to me. I think I could even see the CEO's hands trembling in the TikTok when he lifted them from the device after demonstrating 500 WPM. It certainly incurs a massive cognitive load, perhaps similar to what professional classical musicians can pull off—and they don't have invent the score at the same time as they are performing. Someone capable of decent touch typing on QWERTY will hardly benefit from the additional typing speed IMHO; at least not when factoring in the time spent learning, and the inevitable decrease of typing speed on QWERTY keyboards which will be very hard to avoid when working in a team or multiple locations.
- thewarpaint 5y ago
  > they don't have invent the score at the same time as they are performing Do you mean “improvising”?
  - periheli0n 5y ago
    No, I was referring specifically to classical musicians who typically don't improvise. Improvising musicians will almost certainly not sustain high note counts except in repetitive patterns. If you have an example that proves this wrong I would very much like to hear it ;)
maxerickson 5y ago
10 words in 2 seconds isn't really a very impressive way to do 500 words per minute.
otrahuevada 5y ago
If there's one scenario where I'd dread autocomplete-based/chorded typing is when coding or writing on a terminal. My coding usually comes _after_ some consideration about I want to write, and having to tack an additional "let's proofread what the software thought was close enough" step on top of that would make it seriously annoying. I already have an expansion plugin on my editor that allows me to insert potentially massive amounts of boilerplate for me if I happen to need to, and I already trust it.
westcort 5y ago
I ordered one. This could be a huge benefit for someone like me who writes for a living.
mFixman 5y ago
Is it me, or does this article look suspiciously like an ad?
- cole-k 5y ago
  On the one hand, yeah the "controversy" here seems rather dumb. It's banned from a website where people compare their typing speeds, big whoop. And the discussion about its possible advantage in games like Smash is similarly stupid, seeing as there already are similar controllers. On the other hand, it admittedly seems like it could be a nice development in consumer stenography. I'm only aware of open-source stuff like Plover, which I never got around to trying. I admit that if the sensationalism and fake drama were stripped, the article would probably read like a product endorsement. So I guess me saying, "I'm OK with ads if they're cool" is itself a dumb defense.
omot 5y ago
Is the bottleneck the keyboard or my mind? Not sure if having faster keyboard is all that helpful day to day.
m3kw9 5y ago
Will take me 2 years to learn this that’s more than the time saved in my life time to type a bit slower
feisar 5y ago
I think the idea is good but if its auto-completing and readjusting as you go I dont think your even typing properly. Just my 2 cents.
jaqalopes 5y ago
A lot of people are expressing doubt about the utility of faster typing speed--rightly so, since that is the focus of the article. However, as a prose writer, I'm actually quite excited about this kind of device. When I'm typing 50,000+ characters of prose per week, every week, that's a lot of finger strain with a QWERTY keyboard--and I feel it. If a device let me accomplish that work with less net impact on my hands, even if it wasn't any faster, I would embrace that in a heartbeat.
- periheli0n 5y ago
  Split keyboards have done wonders for me. But a different keyboard alone won't solve the strain problems. A combination of using an ergonomic typing device, exercise, regular breaks and time off the keyboard are essential. When you already feel the strain it's high time to do something against it, damage might already be done. Carpal tunnel or other inflammations are really painful and can take months to recover, during which your productivity will be quite low. Better to type only 40,000 characters a week and give your hands some rest, than squeeze 50,000 out of them until the damage is done.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  Did you try voice transcription?
powera 5y ago
This feels like native advertising. But effective! I may buy one just in case it works.
kazinator 5y ago
> Instead of typing h e l l o, a chorded typer mashes h, e, l, and o to produce the word. So, no, it won't be typing "cadddr" for you in your Lisp code when you mash c, a, d, r. Probably, "card". Of course it's banned from typing competitions; you're not actually typing the word; the algorithm is. From the contest's point of view, it's morally equivalent to a regular QWERTY keyboard equipped with firmware that corrects typos.
Arisaka1 5y ago
This is interesting to me not because of the typing speed but because of something almost everyone will find weird: As a developer I'm not a fan of typing due to health reasons. The long story: I have an undiagnosed disease/syndrome which, among other things, makes my fingertips become red and cold during winter season, and it gets worse when I'm typing. So in the summer I can pretty much type all day. It's not that my hands don't get cold while playing video games on my Playstation controller, they just get worst. I assume that the impact on every finger makes it worse, because I can wear all the layers of cloth in the house + have the air condition turned on and all I can get is my face and ears all red, but the fingers still cold as ice cubes. From my standpoint, I see the potential use as an accessibility tool. If I can write words and avoid the step where my fingers suffer the impact of every keypress that's a big win for me. It's not like I can't type (obviously) but I'm wondering if I could train myself to code using something like this to avoid discomfort. I once entertained the idea of using my PS4 controller since Steam uses something similar.
- tomohawk 5y ago
  Try going gluten free for 2 months. Seriously. Family member had issues like this and tried many docs. No results after lots of testing. Tried going off gluten for other reasons and everything cleared. To go gluten free, only eat foods that are certified gluten free. Anything with any kind of grain that is not certified likely has cross contamination.
- lima 5y ago
  You probably already got checked for this, but just in case: this sounds like a textbook Raynaud's syndrome presentation.
- tesin 5y ago
  Envavo Heatbuff was invented to help this. Unfortunately they seem to have gone out of business
olliej 5y ago
Is it a chording keyboard? because those hav existed for decades, and are demonstrably faster for typing. They just have a steeper learning curve. Follow on question: does anyone know how court stenographer keyboards work?
scoofy 5y ago
When i switched to dvorak, i quickly realized that the main benefit i got was improved comfort, not a ton more speed. My point is only that one should focus on comfort with any keyboard, especially when you're using it multiple hours per day.
darau1 5y ago
It looks more comfortable to type on than a traditional keyboard. That to me is more important than the speed improvements.
notyourwork 5y ago
Anecdotal: Growing up my school had various computer classes, starting in elementary all the way through high school. In high school we had a computer proficiency class which was basically "how to use a computer for dummies 101" type of class and one of the competencies the teacher had us work on was typing. Well me, having grown up with computers, I was beyond proficient and in particular was quite a competent typist. Being an engineer at heart (lazy) I realized I could rig the system and be just fast enough each week to win but also faster than my classmates to remain on the leaderboard. The teach was thoroughly pleased with my weekly progress and applauded my efforts. All the while I was busy gaming (Nerf Arena, Quake) on a LAN with some others in the school who were "computer proficient".
nicoty 5y ago
Is it possible to edit the dictionary used for the auto completion? Is it possible to edit the characters it inputs from the defaults, even to characters not in the English alphabet? Which operating systems is it compatible with?
- aphit 5y ago
  Yes, you can manage and edit your chord library. Default device has 500 chords for the 300 most common English words. It supports other character sets--have to join their discord and look to see which ones. It's compatible with any system a keyboard would be. The OS doesn't know it's not just a USB keyboard.
dwg 5y ago
This gets me curious about a Japanese version. Due to the larger number of basic characters (46) Japanese smart phone input already uses flick-joystick like motions, with pretty amazing speed (for a smart phone). The 46 basic characters are input using 10 keys with 5 directions each: in (press), left, up, right, down. Does CharaChorder support a press as well, or just left/up/right/down?
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  Japanese input’s core part is less the direct input and more the conversion to the target character (which relies on the IME, so we’re not far from the “chorded” mechanism of this keyboard) For instance there is a “kana” mode that let’s you direct input each kana with one keystroke only, which is way faster than romaji input, but is ignored by 99% of the population because the ROI on learning it is extremely low as you’re still converting to kanji at the end. To your point, a ten-key style input on desktop would probably be slower than kana input.
  - dwg 5y ago
    Is Kana input really that much faster than Romaji? I've almost never seen it used (presumably because you have to learn romaji input to type in English anyway, so why learn a second input method), so can't speak to its speed. However, is it possible that ten-key style input could actually be faster than Kana input? After all, direct Kana input in Japanese is kind of equivalent to Roman input in English in the sense of one key = one character, but this keyboard claims to be faster than direct input due to not needing to move your fingers around. Couldn't the same thing be true for Japanese? In fact, for Kana input the problem of finger travel is even worse due to more keys = longer travel.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      I've never seen it used IRL as well. People tout a 30% speed increase over romaji: https://persol-tech-s.co.jp/i-engineer/technology/key-kana https://persol-tech-s.co.jp/i-engineer/technology/key-kana > this keyboard claims to be faster than direct input due to not needing to move your fingers around That would perhaps work if you remapped the movement to not be linked to romaji, but direct kana mappings. Then it's not just 26 keys combination for the alphabet alone, but 46+ more arrangement, and more for ° and ". With 10 fingers it feels like hell just for standard text input (to note, you can only use 9 for combination as you need a transformation key, and I guess you also need backspace and arrow keys ?), and you add to that punctuation etc. I'm not sure there can be an actual human being effectively typing faster with this...
Cilvic 5y ago
Everytime I see thread on typing speed it makes me want to re-surrect this: https://github.com/janmechtel/rockettype https://github.com/janmechtel/rockettype I wanted to start small with measuring real-life typing speed. And then work on two epics: 1. more aggressive Auto-Correct: why can you swipe "messy" on your phone and everything just works, all typos corrected fine, but the same doesn't work on PC? 2. typing technique trainer, webcam record your fingers and learn to use the right fingers for the right keys Is anybody interested?
dfranke 5y ago
Steno devices are well-known to the speed typing community. Some competitions allow them, some don't. You can't bring this to one that doesn't for the same reason you can't bring a F1 to a stock car race.
haihaibye 5y ago
For programming, I wonder if there isn't a lot of low hanging fruit just by key remapping. For instance, a large proportion of keystrokes must be for opening and closing brackets, which requires two fingers for shift + the key. I bet I press brackets more than "d", "f", "j", "k" - the best positioned keys in QUERTY
- bern4444 5y ago
  I have a keyboard[0] that supports a concept of layers which means if I press a key (or hold it down) the layout changes. With this, I have it set such that the keys i o, and k l, are for curly braces and parentheses. My left hand holds down the trigger to swap layers and so that my right hand doesn't have to move much if at all to hit these keys. [0]https://ergodox-ez.com https://ergodox-ez.com
  - MyNameIsFred 5y ago
    Yes! I dove into this (and later, Moondlander) because I have mobility issues and had to reduce travel, but the resulting 90WPM and (unprovably) faster coding have been awesome side-effects.
chmod600 5y ago
How fast can he write Perl code?
asimjalis 5y ago
Here is the direct link to the CharaCorder website https://www.charachorder.com/ https://www.charachorder.com/
wwwtyro 5y ago
Make it mobile so that I can use it as a mouse without taking my hands off the keyboard, and I'll go through the trouble of learning to use it. Could even make both halves mobile so that I can use each one as an independent mouse.
marcodiego 5y ago
500 WPM! I wonder bandwidth measurements we'll soon have to consider with regards to transfer rates in human computer interfaces. I've seen blind people use computers with synthesizers much faster than human are able to talk, maybe even read. We are still far from programming languages which can make reasonable use of such bandwidth though.
dave_sid 5y ago
So it lets you type faster than you can think but that’s only useful if you are copying existing text and for that you can just use OCR.
zwieback 5y ago
I still have a "Twiddler" chord keyboard in my drawer - the Granddaddy of this thing.
pnathan 5y ago
This is really cool. I'm not sure I want to _use_ it, my experiments with chorded phone keyboards have uniformly been blah. But, I really like it and want to see people using it.
jonnycat 5y ago
"Man on bicycle moves so fast he's banned from running competitions"
personjerry 5y ago
This has got to be a paid advertisement, not a real article
sturmeh 5y ago
It's not the keyboard itself but the software implemented that allows users to type this fast by predicting the order that you intended to hit keys allowing you to press all the buttons in "hello" at the same time, the fact it translates the ambiguous keypress into a dictionary word is the assistance. It's clearly "cheating" in the context of a typing competition.
bnkamalesh 5y ago
Why do a lot of people use "suspect" instead of "suspicious" :|
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  This is how sus became the one true way.
linsomniac 5y ago
Years ago I had a friend who was in IT, but had a side job doing data entry. When he got a new set of data to do entry on, he would develop custom data entry environment specifically for that data. He said it effectively gave him some large multiplier in typing speed, making a minimum wage job fairly profitable for him to do.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Sidenote: Ghost in the Shell had people with cybernetic hands that would convert from ten fingers to dozens for super rapid typing. Which was a bit weird in a show about cybernetics with tons of direct mind links: why not just thinktype?
efitz 5y ago
Does anyone actually generate 500WPM of content? I sure don’t. That’s almost 18 tweets or SMS per minute. And I’ll bet that due to limitations of the human brain that if you tried to come up with 500WPM of content that it would have about the same quality and information density as 18 average tweets. I guess if you were a stenographer or audio transcriber then maybe this is interesting.
pseingatl 5y ago
If this works--and I have my doubts--it will revolutionize the stenographic industry and bring stenographic recording to the masses. Furthermore, the article barely mentions the role of AI, and its role here is significant. It is AI and word/phrase completion that allow Chinese writers to approach 200 wpm and regularly hit 125 wpm. Only expert English language typists regularly reach 100 wpm. It wasn't that long ago that the ability to type only 40 wpm qualified you as a clerk/typist in the military or the government. If it works half as well as the claim it would be an extraordinary advance. The issue is the length of time it takes to become proficient.
qwerty456127 5y ago
What about the mouse? I use mouse a lot and don't feel like I really giving this habit up because the general ecosystem of apps you have to use if programming is not your primary job and terminal is not your primary environment is not particularly keyboard-friendly. Does this device offer an efficient (perhaps something trackpoint-like) way to move your mouse pointer without moving your hand between it and the mouse?
- aphit 5y ago
  The device currently offers a switch, available to either hand, that moves the mouse up, down, left, right. You can use them both at the same time for diagonal movements and same direction movements to increase the speed--but it's nothing you'd want to use in an FPS and that's why you see Riley playing with the CC in one hand and mouse in the other.
- boublepop 5y ago
  Oddly enough no. I would have though that had been thought I to the design since it’s such a natural extension. But no, the CEO has TikTok’s playing Valorant, and he’s using a mouse and only the left side. Which also makes it slightly odd when he makes claims like “characorder helped me win” because when has the speed of keyboard entry ever been the limiting factor in an FPS?
Zenst 5y ago
Very interesting design and good logical extension of the whole chord keyboard approach which I recall the early https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter One of those interfaces I've always wanted to give a go, but never really invested the effort in trying. Though the prospect of breaking a finger and being locked out of your computer as your unable to enter your password; Is one aspect of chord keyboards that would compound a stressful day.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
Looks like it’s banned because it is aided by predictive text software?
Townley 5y ago
It’s surprising to me that stenography-esque chording hasn’t had a breakthrough moment among programmers. Most programmers love trading hotkey/shortcut recommendations, and software from vim to blender to photoshop show users have a deep interest in using shortcuts to become more efficient. Hardware restrictions notwithstanding, if my keyboard driver/OS had convenient support for importing standardized maps that let me type `h-down, e-down, release` instead of “hello” I’d gladly (slowly) start using it
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  I feel this is already what we get with IDE auto-completion and snippets. Then some people push it further with personalized dictionaries and TextExpander like extensions at the OS level. I am not sure how much a dedicated hardware device would be an improvement, at least it wouldn't warrant the learning curve and portability issues to me personally.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  I also love to improve my input methods. I'm still not convinced steno works well for code. One because I haven't seen a convincing example (all the examples I've seen were youtube videos where it's obvious someone's working hard trying to remember the inputs they just fed into their dictionary to produce a specific piece of code). Two, because I think code is by nature very different from natural language and you have to be extremely precise with every dash, underscore, capital letter and symbol, and there are lots of identifiers that are abbreviations or not natural words at all.
blunte 5y ago
This looks awesome. Whether 500 WPM or not, I would give this a try. Long ago I learned the BAT one hand chorded keyboard. For one hand typing, I got to around 50 or 60 wpm - but only prose. It was much too slow for programming, as symbols and modifiers required their own chord plus the chord of the final character. But with two hands, or even some modifier key foot switches or a second chord hand (like the CharaChorder), it should be fine.
dusted 5y ago
of course it's not cheating to use the best available tool for the task
hintymad 5y ago
Donald Knuth used to mentioned that he went to secretary school to learn typing more than 80 WPM. Then he found that he couldn't think as fast, so he resorted to writing with a pen and then typing out what he wrote. In work, I find that people who type smoothly and flawlessly often need to think fast. I don't break my stroke of typing a long command line because I can't type fast but because I have to pause to think what I need to type next.
srg0 5y ago
I like this typo in the article: "*Monkeytpe* won’t let Keen run up the leaderboard". The author is a fsat tpyist.
shever73 5y ago
This reminds me of an old electronic organiser / PDA that was available in the 80s/90s that had just five (I think) keys for typing. Letters were formed by pressing the keys in combination. Skilled users could type very quickly on it. I can't remember the name of it now. "Jaguar" is in my head, but I think I'm conflating it with the Atari console.
jacquesm 5y ago
Is this one of those submarine advertising things?
osullivj 5y ago
I saw the Microwriter [1] demoed at the Nottingham Micro Computer Club forty years ago. Nothing new under the sun! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter
Karliss 5y ago
Anyone here remembers datahand? Both of them seem to have similar input space of 4-5 directions per finger and could use similar input methods for mapping that to actual inputs.
headsoup 5y ago
This is just a PR piece by a guy breaking the rules but saying nah it's OK because my thing I made is cool and you should allow it because I made it.
dwighttk 5y ago
> Monkeytpe won’t let Keen run up the leaderboard, but he did win another typing competition using the CharaChorder to hit 267 WPM with 76% accuracy. Oof. That’s bad. No other mention of accuracy anywhere else.

630 points by zdw 5y ago

sydthrowaway 5y ago

In the far distant future, supertypers will use prescience to achieve 10000WPM, like guild navigators

betsydupuis 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29816098#29847333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29816098#29847333 Please refer back here and notice the bias that the thread has taken against me as a sexual assault victim. The thread has been hijacked with gaslighting and victim blaming, name calling, and unsubstantiated claims including unknowable thoughts on me. Please contact hn@ycombinator.com to support removing this thread if they admins can't apply policy in an unbiased way.

xg15 5y ago

> Instead of typing h e l l o, a chorded typer mashes h, e, l, and o to produce the word. With practice, it’s much faster If this works like swipe typing on phones, you'll type blazingly fast, but you have to retype each word several times until the AI finally guesses the right one.

JCharante 5y ago
Even better, you have to create a keyboard shortcut for each word.

blacklion 5y ago

And what is about another (non-English) languages? Or not natural languages at all? Looks like chorded mode is useless for anything but natural English text. And I'm doubt, that it can be easily adapted to non-English layouts even in "char per char" mode.

tombert 5y ago

Has anyone tried this with coding? It looks like this is very focused towards writing English, which is fine, but as someone who spends a good chunk of my day around code editors, a keyboard that is crap for code editing is a non-starter. However, if it's good for that, I will probably be buying one.

rappatic 5y ago
He posted an earlier video on his TikTok account showcasing the device's coding capabilities. I don't know if the videos he posts are entirely reliable (eg. as another commenter mentioned, he claimed a 500 wpm typing speed by typing one memorized sentence). I do know that it needs autocorrect (built-in) to work at high WPM which doesn't seem great for coding which might use nontraditional words and spellings. Personally it seems like it would be too great a learning curve for not enough benefit, given that no software is designed for devices like these. Maybe if this somehow takes off in the future.
- tombert 5y ago
  I'm gonna bite the bullet and buy one, I think. I'm ok with a "good enough" coding experience, and I never bought myself a Birthday/Xmas present last year. This will work.
ekimekim 5y ago
> chorded typing allows the users to input several letters at the same time and have a computer program generate a predicted word. Instead of typing h e l l o, a chorded typer mashes h, e, l, and o to produce the word. It sounds like it relies heavily on autocomplete, which means it's unlikely to be useful for coding instead of just English text.
- cwp 5y ago
  No, that means it's likely very useful for coding instead of English. You just need a custom dictionary. Code has a smaller vocabulary than prose, even with the domain-specific words that get used as identifiers . You could probably do pretty well with a dictionary that just has all the keywords in your favorite language, plus some common variable names. Heck I bet it'd be a win just to make the punctuation used in code have convenient chords.

Dig1t 5y ago

All of this seems like an advertisement. It does seem pretty cool though if you have a need to be able type a lot of text really fast; I don't think most programmers need to type fast though. My daily work as a programmer is like 5% typing code and 95% talking to people and thinking about things.

ghostly_s 5y ago

The picture up top is upside down..

prirun 5y ago

"he did win another typing competition using the CharaChorder to hit 267 WPM with 76% accuracy." 76% accuracy doesn't sound so great to me, no matter how fast I can type on it.

thepete2 5y ago
Yes, that's terrible. The finished text was not corrected in that time, was it?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
zeckalpha 5y ago
It depends on how it is calculated. If that is one in four key presses vs one in four words it is very different
bombcar 5y ago
Interviewer: "I heard you were extremely quick at math" Me: "yes, as a matter of fact I am" Interviewer: "Whats 14x27" Me: "49" Interviewer: "that's not even close" me: "yeah, but it was fast" Shamelessly stolen, but yeah, 76% accuracy is only 3/4s of characters typed correctly; if that "works" you could probably just train yourself to not even type the lesser used parts of the alphabet ...
- malshe 5y ago
  Thanks for the chuckle!
- cafard 5y ago
  Back in the manual typewriter days, every typo subtracted 10 WPM from your score. (Source: my junior-high typing class.) It seems to me that 76% accuracy would put you into negative WPM by that reckoning.
  - bee_rider 5y ago

58x14 5y ago

I'm fairly obsessed with alternative HIDs. I bought the Tap Strap 2 but never broke past the initial learning curve. I'm going to buy a CharaChorder now. I'm also a musician, so I'm really interested to see what types of functionality I could map, given the additional interface dimensions. However, I'll need to test the input lag, typically anything > 20ms is rather noticeable for live music; if they have esports as a target market, hopefully they've already accounted for that. I type ~80WPM with 90%+ accuracy, but I don't find that typing speed is my blocker, rather the speed of a coherent thought. Maybe typing at ludicrous speeds will channel some deep stream of consciousness?

Shank 5y ago
> I type ~80WPM with 90%+ accuracy, but I don't find that typing speed is my blocker, rather the speed of a coherent thought. Maybe typing at ludicrous speeds will channel some deep stream of consciousness? I agree with this, at least to some extent. If I'm rote copying something from a text (e.g., from a typing test website), I can achieve 130-140wpm easily. If I'm creating original thought or trying to actually compose a reply to someone, I think much slower than I can type. It takes a lot more effort to compose logical sentences that make sense on paper than it does to type them, in my experience. What really makes me want to try these alternate input systems is the allure of being able to type while walking outside at speed, which is something I can't do on a smartphone. CharaChorder seems like it's nice on a desk, but the same could be said for a plain stenography keyboard/machine.
- 58x14 5y ago
  > type while walking outside at speed Yes, exactly this. I didn't expect the Tap Strap would be refined enough to serve this purpose (too much ambient motion) but I like to keep looking for something novel.
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  >If I'm rote copying something from a text (e.g., from a typing test website), I can achieve 130-140wpm easily. Weird. I have the opposite problem. I'm usually in the ~80-90 range typing something I'm reading. I find it way slower to read the text, the repeat it. But if I'm typing from my brain I'm way faster because I can skip the reading step.

caslon 5y ago

Chording input devices hardly count as keyboards. It's not even that it's fast, it's that it's an entirely different paradigm of input. Stenography is an entirely different skillset than typing. According to its website, the device mentioned in the article basically serves as a device that does autocorrect on top of traditional chording, which is quite literally cheating in typing competitions.

hannasanarion 5y ago
> article basically serves as a device that does autocorrect on top of traditional chording This is normal for chording input devices. Both old-school stenography machines and modern steno software like Plover are context-sensitive to consecutive inputs.

umvi 5y ago

The "500 WPM" video is a little suspect. He types literally one memorized sentence and extrapolates a WPM from that one 10 word sentence. I'd like to see him actually type 500 meaningful words in under 60 seconds. Anyway, this is cool but basically just a modern stenography device. Steno has a learning curve problem that makes it so most people won't use it.

ouid 5y ago
well that and the fact that this is transparently an advertisement masquerading as journalism.
tambourine_man 5y ago
QWERTY has a steep learning curve as well, it’s just that it’s so ubiquitous that most people don’t question or remember the work that was put into.
- globuous 5y ago
  Yeah, I switched to Dvorak a few years back, it was the worst experience in the world. Granted I had to fight against my qwerty reflexes
  - snuxoll 5y ago
    I was lucky to never have properly learned to touch type on QWERTY in the first place, I had key positions memorized but I always used my index fingers - it actually hindered me from touch typing as the bad habit would always creep back up. Thus I forced myself to learn from square one with Dvorak, not having the keycaps on my keyboard to fall back on - it was painful, but I'm glad I did it. Now 15 years later I really enjoy the flow of the layout, a majority of the time when typing you alternate between sides of the keyboard when typing and it just feels good.
  - nthdeui 5y ago
    When I learnt to touch type I switched to Dvorak at the same time. I liked the idea of improved efficiency but whenever I had to use someone else's computer or they needed to use mine it was too much hassle. Once I'd relearned to touch type with Qwerty life was so much easier. Also hjkl with Vim using Dvorak was just too hard to get my brain around

torpfactory 5y ago

I don’t think my problem is being able to get the words from my brain into the computer fast enough. My typical HID use case is composing meaningful written communication, a process which is unfortunately much slower than 500wpm.

Dumblydorr 5y ago
Yeah. The sheer amount of button presses to write a 1k line script? That'd be roughly 10,000 words let's say, so 500 wpm would bang that out in a mere 20 minutes. Meanwhile the thoughts to compose 1k lines of code? That could take weeks of reasoning to deduce the proper logic.
- jcrawfordor 5y ago
  These days I type at about 80-90wpm which is not as fast as I once could (there was a point where I could achieve 130wpm on Dvorak but I was both younger and had less of a life). As is, though, it's very noticeable that I can type faster than I can actually compose text. I've also found that typing very fast tends to lead to a much higher rate of what I call "wordos," in which you mistype by completely swapping a word with another or omitting a word... these feel like symptoms of a sort of "buffer underrun" when typing that doesn't get noticed because I'm already having to move on to composing the next sentence. So yes, I think there's a significant effect of diminishing returns on very high typing speeds, and I'd take a guess that it starts really kicking in at something not that high like 60wpm.
jhauris 5y ago
I consider typing speed the I/O of the operation. Sure there's some processing time while you think of what to type, but regardless of how long that takes, typing will slow it down further. I'm not perfectly parallelized in thinking/typing pipelines.
- nepeckman 5y ago
  I agree with the analogy, but for me (and I think most people) processing time far exceeds IO. Once you get to a good enough IO speed, it doesnt make sense to optimize further, as the returns are diminishing.

jtsiskin 5y ago

Fascinating. This is the first article I’ve read where the source is exclusively tiktok videos

jedberg 5y ago
And Discord.
amelius 5y ago
After reading only the headline, I'm not surprised.
kmlx 5y ago
Keen, CEO of the keyboard company, is mentioned several times. At the end of the article: > Keen did not return Motherboard’s request for comment.
ycIsGarbage 5y ago
Xevi 5y ago
That's because pretty much all of their promotional content is short TikTok videos.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Cool but who needs this? I'd rather see a keyboard that limits you to 10 WPM so you are forced to think before you type

AlexCoventry 5y ago
Sometimes it's useful to be able to run a series of quick experiments, each based in some complex way on the outcome of the previous ones, to develop an empirical understanding of how something is working.
maxbond 5y ago
I've never completed the leap to a chordal interface, but my interest in them is about ergonomics, not speed. For instance, a habit I had to break to avoid hurting myself on the keyboard was rotating my hands to reach a key. This is simply not a problem on chordal keyboards.
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  The ergonomics angle is a good one, I failed to consider that
ars 5y ago
Not everyone thinks while typing. I do all my thinking ahead of time, then I just need to record it on the screen after I'm done. I'm usually thinking of other things at that time, since I just need to transcribe the words in my head, not think about them.
- gowld 5y ago
  How much text do you memorize before you type a round?
  - ars 5y ago
    It's not a specific amount, and it's not memorization of specific words, it's more like assigning a sub-processor the task of converting the ideas into typing, while the main brain moves on to other things. You've never had that with programming or other tasks? You think and figure out what to do, and then it's just a matter of getting the idea down on paper (or computer).

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Back in the 90's I worked with a guy who used a Dvorak. Any fans still out there?

tombert 5y ago
I tried learning Dvorak about 9 years ago, and I got good enough for IMing and emails and whatnot, but I found it extremely difficult to context-switch between coding-editor keystrokes and conversational keystrokes. I know it has its fans, but I could never really get the hang of Vim with Dvorak, and I also didn't type any my emails any faster than I was with QWERTY, so I abandoned it and haven't tried Dvorak since.
warp 5y ago
Yup! I learned Dvorak probably in 1999 or early 2000s (and I have a coworker who also still uses Dvorak). The kind of people (like me) who got into Dvorak at that time would today probably learn something like Colemak DH, although there are many alternatives available nowadays and a big (discord) scene of folks optimizing and designing both their keyboards and the layouts they use on them. I expect Dvorak will die with people like me, because anyone willing to switch away from Qwerty is probably better served by other alternatives.
- jasone 5y ago
  I disagree with your assessment that Dvorak has been obsoleted by other layouts. I used Dvorak 1998-2001, and again since 2018. Before I re-learned it in 2018 I did a bunch of research on Colemak, Workman, and the rich set of other optimized layouts people have created this century. There are compromises in every layout, and I came to the conclusion that Dvorak was within spitting distance of minimally pessimal, other named layouts less so. The caveat to my perspective is that I don't care where hotkeys are. I minimize mouse use, and with both hands on the keyboard it just doesn't matter very much. I've used emacs and vim with both layouts. My faded recollection with respect to emacs is that it was equivocal, and Dvorak is actually a bit better for vim.
panda888888 5y ago
I've used Dvorak for more than 15 years and love it. I'm "fluent" in QWERTY too but am faster in Dvorak. I also use it on my phone. Dvorak is terrible on swipe keyboards but I'm used to it. It was annoying to learn but I forced myself to power though my initially slow typing speeds, and it was 100% worth it. I highly recommend it.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

typing speed is rarely the limiting factor on productivity. HN can be though. get back to work.

passivate 5y ago
Agreed, I don't think editing text has ever been a bottleneck for developers at any point of time. The vast majority of time is spent on reading, thinking, discussing, explaining, and debugging code. This is also why I rue the time I wasted learning vi.

DrBoring 5y ago

I wonder how effective this CharaChorder is at preventing RSI (repetitive stress injury). It still seems to have the same flaw as QWERTY in that it requires you to use your small finger muscles, which are more prone to RSI than say your biceps. ps: Ugg, vice.com. I don't care for them.

ghostly_s 5y ago
twitching your fingertips left and right seems like a terribly unnatural repetitive motion to me, I would be concerned.
- MandieD 5y ago
  As a flute player who has experienced my right pinky locking up after passages involving moving between the footjoint keys, you're right to be concerned.

pipework 5y ago

This reminds me of the speedrunning community ‘any percent’ ladders and how anything goes to get to the finish. Such a grind, but very specific applicable knowledge, and no meaningful generalizable growth at the end to bring to another game.

Dumblydorr 5y ago

That thing isn't really a keyboard is it? It doesn't have keys and it isn't a board. It's more a joystick controller.

xondono 5y ago
Those joysticks do have switches at the ends (that click) though… I don’t know, it’s a very philosophical question

rkagerer 5y ago

I'm more curious what the ergonomics are like on this device and how it compares to keyboards like the Kinesis Advantage for preventing injuries.

abeppu 5y ago

> Keen is experimenting with a modified version of the device that he thinks might even allow babies to type and communicate similarly to the way some babies communicate with sign language. I feel like this warrants its own article. Jumping from understanding but not being able to reliably speak words to chording without reading or letters in between sounds like a really interesting direction. Are the chords chosen to relate to orthography? To sound? To semantics? How would you teach it? A caregiver can easily demonstrate a sign. A chord is a lot less visually salient and harder to demonstrate.

aaronscott 5y ago

I looked into buying one a few weeks ago but ultimately decided not to move forward. One reason was that it comes with a pre-configured list of 500 chords, so it's up to users to create their own beyond the initial list. The other was that the build quality doesn't appear to be that great (with the PCB board clearly visible). The reddit community[0] has some helpful reviews and progress updates. And their discord server[1] is quite active with lots of helpful links and advice. 0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/charachorder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/charachorder/ 1 - https://discord.com/invite/jMj6grUuBc https://discord.com/invite/jMj6grUuBc

jeofken 5y ago
FYI links to reddit do not work if user is not logged in - at least on mobile. Sad to see its decline.
- andrewxdiamond 5y ago
  old.reddit.com still works https://old.reddit.com/r/charachorder/ https://old.reddit.com/r/charachorder/
- mgerb 5y ago
  On mobile replace the “www” with “i” to get something that actually works on a phone. The new mobile site is such horrible user experience in almost every way.
  - Nition 5y ago
    For the lazy: https://i.reddit.com/r/charachorder/ https://i.reddit.com/r/charachorder/

mhb 5y ago

...he did win another typing competition using the CharaChorder to hit 267 WPM with 76% accuracy. Isn't this accuracy abysmal?

jjice 5y ago
If my accuracy was 76%, I'd be upset. I'd definitely work on accuracy over raw speed at that point.
angio 5y ago
Yes, IIRC stenographers in the US are required to type 225 WPM with 98% accuracy.

usrbinbash 5y ago

>You may soon see that coworker with the weird monolith style trackball mouse rocking this strange peripheral and claiming he’s upped his efficiency in ways you can’t possibly imagine. Since coding is 20% sitting in meetings, 50% reading code, 10% drawing on whiteboards or sticky notes, 15% drinking coffee, 4.5% fighting impostor syndrome and 0.5% actual typing, I think I am quite safe with my good 'ol QWERTY.

gowld 5y ago
You type a lot more than 0.5% of the time.
- bastardoperator 5y ago
  I'm typing even less these days with tools like copilot.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    For some reason I don’t like any of this automation tools. I find VSCode unbearable even without copilot. Too many things happen when I type. I prefer linting and that’s about all I want to write my code peacefully. I use vim in iTerm and it’s all I ever need. Jump off to Pycharm to debug if needed.
    - bastardoperator 5y ago
      I use vim quite a bit too, just sayin... https://github.com/github/copilot.vim https://github.com/github/copilot.vim
      - systemvoltage 5y ago
        Oh boy..., I guess there are people who find this useful. I respect "To each their own" and "You do you". I also like using Sublime Text with vim keymap. I prefer the low latency of editors over features of big IDEs. Sometimes, I do use PyCharm or CLion for debugging since that experience in vim sucks. GDB is terrible in CLI.

xhevahir 5y ago

The idea of typing 500+ words a minute sounds silly to me. If you're writing in a natural language and you can touch type reasonably well, your typing skill is not going to be the bottleneck. Your speed at putting things into words is. Stenography or other data entry are an exception, of course, but I'm guessing the intended audience for these pitches is the average joe who dreams of writing an email in seconds.

mjh2539 5y ago

Is this wireless? I've always thought it would be cool to be able to walk and type at the same time. I always seem to get great ideas while walking and it's tedious having to stop and write them down.

selfhoster11 5y ago
Is there any reason you wouldn't use a standalone pocket sound recorder, or alternatively the sound recorder app on your phone?
mminer237 5y ago
I always just dictate a note in Keep on my phone. I don't think there's a more effective mobile note-taking system.

seagoj 5y ago

I could see this for prose, but this seems all but useless for programming. Even if you combined it with copilot or something I think the time you'd spend fixing what it presented would make you slower in the long run.

TulliusCicero 5y ago

> Keen also claimed that he’d won several online gaming competitions using the CharaChorder, which he says brings up an interesting ethical dilemma. “I’m not sure if there’s any restrictions on what keyboards you’re allowed to use,” he said over a video of him playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on the Nintendo Switch, using his CharaChorder running through a XIM-style adapter. As someone who's somewhat familiar with eSports, I'm having a hard time imagining what game would let this style of keyboard provide a substantial advantage, and I'm very skeptical of these "online gaming competitions" he supposedly won.

ericschn 5y ago
There has been conversation happening regarding tournament play legality of digital input controllers for the Smash Bros games, most notably Super Smash Brothers Melee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smash_Box_controller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smash_Box_controller
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  Yes, but things like regular keyboards, or hitboxes already exist. How does this new thing improve on those?
ericpruitt 5y ago
Check out https://youtu.be/Lw1tcqbFwN4?t=867 https://youtu.be/Lw1tcqbFwN4?t=867 which talks about some of the advantages of stickless controllers. That link points to a particular timestamp, but the video as a whole is pretty interesting IMO.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  I'm aware, I just don't see how this would provide an advantage over already existing methods like hitboxes, or regular keyboards.
  - ericpruitt 5y ago

mpwww 5y ago

Looking at the CharaChorder Lite version — can’t this be done via software implementation with a n-key rollover keyboard? I’d like to try it but not $200 like to try it.

maximus-decimus 5y ago
I agree. It really feels like it should be a PLOVER dictionary.

stakkur 5y ago

> "Chorded typing allows the users to input several letters at the same time and have a computer program generate a predicted word. Instead of typing h e l l o, a chorded typer mashes h, e, l, and o to produce the word. With practice, it’s much faster" There's nothing wrong with this, and many of us probably use similar techniques daily (macros, shortcuts, etc.), but he's not typing 'words per minute' without computer help. So, makes sense it's considered 'cheating' for comparison purposes.

anigbrowl 5y ago

Hmm, finally a chording device that doesn't look like total BS. I'm unwillingly intrigued. As for the underlying story, both sides are right. The chording device seems significantly better for text entry in terms of pure speed. But chording isn't typing, and it's typing, not text entry.

xyoxyoxto 5y ago

dathinab 5y ago

This is probably the best advertisement they could get ;=) Not saying that it's bought or anything, just that as a company focused on a value-delivering-product such articles are just awesome. Especially when the article only focused on your good sites. (No ideas about bad sites, but price ($250, not absurd for that market), compatibility with less usual hand-forms, and it not fitting well with a travel laptop setup (more size needed) are probably some).

samstave 5y ago

UH, you guys dont recall that this keyboard came out in the 80s? And it was designed so that you can have them on your thighs and type whilst standing with arms at relaxed hanging? I loved the idea of chorded-keyboards and I posted in the past about an engineer famous at intel for coding on them on his recumbant bike he would ride to the santa clara campus down san thomas expressway - connecting via a satellite phone and coding in binary in his head as he rode his boke and typed on these guys...

periheli0n 5y ago

Maintaining such typing speeds look like a recipe for burnout to me. I think I could even see the CEO's hands trembling in the TikTok when he lifted them from the device after demonstrating 500 WPM. It certainly incurs a massive cognitive load, perhaps similar to what professional classical musicians can pull off—and they don't have invent the score at the same time as they are performing. Someone capable of decent touch typing on QWERTY will hardly benefit from the additional typing speed IMHO; at least not when factoring in the time spent learning, and the inevitable decrease of typing speed on QWERTY keyboards which will be very hard to avoid when working in a team or multiple locations.

thewarpaint 5y ago
> they don't have invent the score at the same time as they are performing Do you mean “improvising”?
- periheli0n 5y ago
  No, I was referring specifically to classical musicians who typically don't improvise. Improvising musicians will almost certainly not sustain high note counts except in repetitive patterns. If you have an example that proves this wrong I would very much like to hear it ;)

maxerickson 5y ago

10 words in 2 seconds isn't really a very impressive way to do 500 words per minute.

otrahuevada 5y ago

If there's one scenario where I'd dread autocomplete-based/chorded typing is when coding or writing on a terminal. My coding usually comes _after_ some consideration about I want to write, and having to tack an additional "let's proofread what the software thought was close enough" step on top of that would make it seriously annoying. I already have an expansion plugin on my editor that allows me to insert potentially massive amounts of boilerplate for me if I happen to need to, and I already trust it.

westcort 5y ago

I ordered one. This could be a huge benefit for someone like me who writes for a living.

mFixman 5y ago

Is it me, or does this article look suspiciously like an ad?

cole-k 5y ago
On the one hand, yeah the "controversy" here seems rather dumb. It's banned from a website where people compare their typing speeds, big whoop. And the discussion about its possible advantage in games like Smash is similarly stupid, seeing as there already are similar controllers. On the other hand, it admittedly seems like it could be a nice development in consumer stenography. I'm only aware of open-source stuff like Plover, which I never got around to trying. I admit that if the sensationalism and fake drama were stripped, the article would probably read like a product endorsement. So I guess me saying, "I'm OK with ads if they're cool" is itself a dumb defense.

omot 5y ago

Is the bottleneck the keyboard or my mind? Not sure if having faster keyboard is all that helpful day to day.

m3kw9 5y ago

Will take me 2 years to learn this that’s more than the time saved in my life time to type a bit slower

feisar 5y ago

I think the idea is good but if its auto-completing and readjusting as you go I dont think your even typing properly. Just my 2 cents.

jaqalopes 5y ago

A lot of people are expressing doubt about the utility of faster typing speed--rightly so, since that is the focus of the article. However, as a prose writer, I'm actually quite excited about this kind of device. When I'm typing 50,000+ characters of prose per week, every week, that's a lot of finger strain with a QWERTY keyboard--and I feel it. If a device let me accomplish that work with less net impact on my hands, even if it wasn't any faster, I would embrace that in a heartbeat.

periheli0n 5y ago
Split keyboards have done wonders for me. But a different keyboard alone won't solve the strain problems. A combination of using an ergonomic typing device, exercise, regular breaks and time off the keyboard are essential. When you already feel the strain it's high time to do something against it, damage might already be done. Carpal tunnel or other inflammations are really painful and can take months to recover, during which your productivity will be quite low. Better to type only 40,000 characters a week and give your hands some rest, than squeeze 50,000 out of them until the damage is done.
hackerfromthefu 5y ago
Did you try voice transcription?

powera 5y ago

This feels like native advertising. But effective! I may buy one just in case it works.

kazinator 5y ago

> Instead of typing h e l l o, a chorded typer mashes h, e, l, and o to produce the word. So, no, it won't be typing "cadddr" for you in your Lisp code when you mash c, a, d, r. Probably, "card". Of course it's banned from typing competitions; you're not actually typing the word; the algorithm is. From the contest's point of view, it's morally equivalent to a regular QWERTY keyboard equipped with firmware that corrects typos.

Arisaka1 5y ago

This is interesting to me not because of the typing speed but because of something almost everyone will find weird: As a developer I'm not a fan of typing due to health reasons. The long story: I have an undiagnosed disease/syndrome which, among other things, makes my fingertips become red and cold during winter season, and it gets worse when I'm typing. So in the summer I can pretty much type all day. It's not that my hands don't get cold while playing video games on my Playstation controller, they just get worst. I assume that the impact on every finger makes it worse, because I can wear all the layers of cloth in the house + have the air condition turned on and all I can get is my face and ears all red, but the fingers still cold as ice cubes. From my standpoint, I see the potential use as an accessibility tool. If I can write words and avoid the step where my fingers suffer the impact of every keypress that's a big win for me. It's not like I can't type (obviously) but I'm wondering if I could train myself to code using something like this to avoid discomfort. I once entertained the idea of using my PS4 controller since Steam uses something similar.

tomohawk 5y ago
Try going gluten free for 2 months. Seriously. Family member had issues like this and tried many docs. No results after lots of testing. Tried going off gluten for other reasons and everything cleared. To go gluten free, only eat foods that are certified gluten free. Anything with any kind of grain that is not certified likely has cross contamination.
lima 5y ago
You probably already got checked for this, but just in case: this sounds like a textbook Raynaud's syndrome presentation.
tesin 5y ago
Envavo Heatbuff was invented to help this. Unfortunately they seem to have gone out of business

olliej 5y ago

Is it a chording keyboard? because those hav existed for decades, and are demonstrably faster for typing. They just have a steeper learning curve. Follow on question: does anyone know how court stenographer keyboards work?

scoofy 5y ago

When i switched to dvorak, i quickly realized that the main benefit i got was improved comfort, not a ton more speed. My point is only that one should focus on comfort with any keyboard, especially when you're using it multiple hours per day.

darau1 5y ago

It looks more comfortable to type on than a traditional keyboard. That to me is more important than the speed improvements.

notyourwork 5y ago

Anecdotal: Growing up my school had various computer classes, starting in elementary all the way through high school. In high school we had a computer proficiency class which was basically "how to use a computer for dummies 101" type of class and one of the competencies the teacher had us work on was typing. Well me, having grown up with computers, I was beyond proficient and in particular was quite a competent typist. Being an engineer at heart (lazy) I realized I could rig the system and be just fast enough each week to win but also faster than my classmates to remain on the leaderboard. The teach was thoroughly pleased with my weekly progress and applauded my efforts. All the while I was busy gaming (Nerf Arena, Quake) on a LAN with some others in the school who were "computer proficient".

nicoty 5y ago

Is it possible to edit the dictionary used for the auto completion? Is it possible to edit the characters it inputs from the defaults, even to characters not in the English alphabet? Which operating systems is it compatible with?

aphit 5y ago
Yes, you can manage and edit your chord library. Default device has 500 chords for the 300 most common English words. It supports other character sets--have to join their discord and look to see which ones. It's compatible with any system a keyboard would be. The OS doesn't know it's not just a USB keyboard.

dwg 5y ago

This gets me curious about a Japanese version. Due to the larger number of basic characters (46) Japanese smart phone input already uses flick-joystick like motions, with pretty amazing speed (for a smart phone). The 46 basic characters are input using 10 keys with 5 directions each: in (press), left, up, right, down. Does CharaChorder support a press as well, or just left/up/right/down?

makeitdouble 5y ago
Japanese input’s core part is less the direct input and more the conversion to the target character (which relies on the IME, so we’re not far from the “chorded” mechanism of this keyboard) For instance there is a “kana” mode that let’s you direct input each kana with one keystroke only, which is way faster than romaji input, but is ignored by 99% of the population because the ROI on learning it is extremely low as you’re still converting to kanji at the end. To your point, a ten-key style input on desktop would probably be slower than kana input.
- dwg 5y ago
  Is Kana input really that much faster than Romaji? I've almost never seen it used (presumably because you have to learn romaji input to type in English anyway, so why learn a second input method), so can't speak to its speed. However, is it possible that ten-key style input could actually be faster than Kana input? After all, direct Kana input in Japanese is kind of equivalent to Roman input in English in the sense of one key = one character, but this keyboard claims to be faster than direct input due to not needing to move your fingers around. Couldn't the same thing be true for Japanese? In fact, for Kana input the problem of finger travel is even worse due to more keys = longer travel.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    I've never seen it used IRL as well. People tout a 30% speed increase over romaji: https://persol-tech-s.co.jp/i-engineer/technology/key-kana https://persol-tech-s.co.jp/i-engineer/technology/key-kana > this keyboard claims to be faster than direct input due to not needing to move your fingers around That would perhaps work if you remapped the movement to not be linked to romaji, but direct kana mappings. Then it's not just 26 keys combination for the alphabet alone, but 46+ more arrangement, and more for ° and ". With 10 fingers it feels like hell just for standard text input (to note, you can only use 9 for combination as you need a transformation key, and I guess you also need backspace and arrow keys ?), and you add to that punctuation etc. I'm not sure there can be an actual human being effectively typing faster with this...

Cilvic 5y ago

Everytime I see thread on typing speed it makes me want to re-surrect this: https://github.com/janmechtel/rockettype https://github.com/janmechtel/rockettype I wanted to start small with measuring real-life typing speed. And then work on two epics: 1. more aggressive Auto-Correct: why can you swipe "messy" on your phone and everything just works, all typos corrected fine, but the same doesn't work on PC? 2. typing technique trainer, webcam record your fingers and learn to use the right fingers for the right keys Is anybody interested?

dfranke 5y ago

Steno devices are well-known to the speed typing community. Some competitions allow them, some don't. You can't bring this to one that doesn't for the same reason you can't bring a F1 to a stock car race.

haihaibye 5y ago

For programming, I wonder if there isn't a lot of low hanging fruit just by key remapping. For instance, a large proportion of keystrokes must be for opening and closing brackets, which requires two fingers for shift + the key. I bet I press brackets more than "d", "f", "j", "k" - the best positioned keys in QUERTY

bern4444 5y ago
I have a keyboard[0] that supports a concept of layers which means if I press a key (or hold it down) the layout changes. With this, I have it set such that the keys i o, and k l, are for curly braces and parentheses. My left hand holds down the trigger to swap layers and so that my right hand doesn't have to move much if at all to hit these keys. [0]https://ergodox-ez.com https://ergodox-ez.com
- MyNameIsFred 5y ago
  Yes! I dove into this (and later, Moondlander) because I have mobility issues and had to reduce travel, but the resulting 90WPM and (unprovably) faster coding have been awesome side-effects.

chmod600 5y ago

How fast can he write Perl code?

asimjalis 5y ago

Here is the direct link to the CharaCorder website https://www.charachorder.com/ https://www.charachorder.com/

wwwtyro 5y ago

Make it mobile so that I can use it as a mouse without taking my hands off the keyboard, and I'll go through the trouble of learning to use it. Could even make both halves mobile so that I can use each one as an independent mouse.

marcodiego 5y ago

500 WPM! I wonder bandwidth measurements we'll soon have to consider with regards to transfer rates in human computer interfaces. I've seen blind people use computers with synthesizers much faster than human are able to talk, maybe even read. We are still far from programming languages which can make reasonable use of such bandwidth though.

dave_sid 5y ago

So it lets you type faster than you can think but that’s only useful if you are copying existing text and for that you can just use OCR.

zwieback 5y ago

I still have a "Twiddler" chord keyboard in my drawer - the Granddaddy of this thing.

pnathan 5y ago

This is really cool. I'm not sure I want to _use_ it, my experiments with chorded phone keyboards have uniformly been blah. But, I really like it and want to see people using it.

jonnycat 5y ago

"Man on bicycle moves so fast he's banned from running competitions"

personjerry 5y ago

This has got to be a paid advertisement, not a real article

sturmeh 5y ago

It's not the keyboard itself but the software implemented that allows users to type this fast by predicting the order that you intended to hit keys allowing you to press all the buttons in "hello" at the same time, the fact it translates the ambiguous keypress into a dictionary word is the assistance. It's clearly "cheating" in the context of a typing competition.

bnkamalesh 5y ago

Why do a lot of people use "suspect" instead of "suspicious" :|

themodelplumber 5y ago
This is how sus became the one true way.

linsomniac 5y ago

Years ago I had a friend who was in IT, but had a side job doing data entry. When he got a new set of data to do entry on, he would develop custom data entry environment specifically for that data. He said it effectively gave him some large multiplier in typing speed, making a minimum wage job fairly profitable for him to do.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Sidenote: Ghost in the Shell had people with cybernetic hands that would convert from ten fingers to dozens for super rapid typing. Which was a bit weird in a show about cybernetics with tons of direct mind links: why not just thinktype?

efitz 5y ago

Does anyone actually generate 500WPM of content? I sure don’t. That’s almost 18 tweets or SMS per minute. And I’ll bet that due to limitations of the human brain that if you tried to come up with 500WPM of content that it would have about the same quality and information density as 18 average tweets. I guess if you were a stenographer or audio transcriber then maybe this is interesting.

pseingatl 5y ago

If this works--and I have my doubts--it will revolutionize the stenographic industry and bring stenographic recording to the masses. Furthermore, the article barely mentions the role of AI, and its role here is significant. It is AI and word/phrase completion that allow Chinese writers to approach 200 wpm and regularly hit 125 wpm. Only expert English language typists regularly reach 100 wpm. It wasn't that long ago that the ability to type only 40 wpm qualified you as a clerk/typist in the military or the government. If it works half as well as the claim it would be an extraordinary advance. The issue is the length of time it takes to become proficient.

qwerty456127 5y ago

What about the mouse? I use mouse a lot and don't feel like I really giving this habit up because the general ecosystem of apps you have to use if programming is not your primary job and terminal is not your primary environment is not particularly keyboard-friendly. Does this device offer an efficient (perhaps something trackpoint-like) way to move your mouse pointer without moving your hand between it and the mouse?

aphit 5y ago
The device currently offers a switch, available to either hand, that moves the mouse up, down, left, right. You can use them both at the same time for diagonal movements and same direction movements to increase the speed--but it's nothing you'd want to use in an FPS and that's why you see Riley playing with the CC in one hand and mouse in the other.
boublepop 5y ago
Oddly enough no. I would have though that had been thought I to the design since it’s such a natural extension. But no, the CEO has TikTok’s playing Valorant, and he’s using a mouse and only the left side. Which also makes it slightly odd when he makes claims like “characorder helped me win” because when has the speed of keyboard entry ever been the limiting factor in an FPS?

Zenst 5y ago

Very interesting design and good logical extension of the whole chord keyboard approach which I recall the early https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter One of those interfaces I've always wanted to give a go, but never really invested the effort in trying. Though the prospect of breaking a finger and being locked out of your computer as your unable to enter your password; Is one aspect of chord keyboards that would compound a stressful day.

LudwigNagasena 5y ago

Looks like it’s banned because it is aided by predictive text software?

Townley 5y ago

It’s surprising to me that stenography-esque chording hasn’t had a breakthrough moment among programmers. Most programmers love trading hotkey/shortcut recommendations, and software from vim to blender to photoshop show users have a deep interest in using shortcuts to become more efficient. Hardware restrictions notwithstanding, if my keyboard driver/OS had convenient support for importing standardized maps that let me type `h-down, e-down, release` instead of “hello” I’d gladly (slowly) start using it

makeitdouble 5y ago
I feel this is already what we get with IDE auto-completion and snippets. Then some people push it further with personalized dictionaries and TextExpander like extensions at the OS level. I am not sure how much a dedicated hardware device would be an improvement, at least it wouldn't warrant the learning curve and portability issues to me personally.
foxfluff 5y ago
I also love to improve my input methods. I'm still not convinced steno works well for code. One because I haven't seen a convincing example (all the examples I've seen were youtube videos where it's obvious someone's working hard trying to remember the inputs they just fed into their dictionary to produce a specific piece of code). Two, because I think code is by nature very different from natural language and you have to be extremely precise with every dash, underscore, capital letter and symbol, and there are lots of identifiers that are abbreviations or not natural words at all.

blunte 5y ago

This looks awesome. Whether 500 WPM or not, I would give this a try. Long ago I learned the BAT one hand chorded keyboard. For one hand typing, I got to around 50 or 60 wpm - but only prose. It was much too slow for programming, as symbols and modifiers required their own chord plus the chord of the final character. But with two hands, or even some modifier key foot switches or a second chord hand (like the CharaChorder), it should be fine.

dusted 5y ago

of course it's not cheating to use the best available tool for the task

hintymad 5y ago

Donald Knuth used to mentioned that he went to secretary school to learn typing more than 80 WPM. Then he found that he couldn't think as fast, so he resorted to writing with a pen and then typing out what he wrote. In work, I find that people who type smoothly and flawlessly often need to think fast. I don't break my stroke of typing a long command line because I can't type fast but because I have to pause to think what I need to type next.

srg0 5y ago

I like this typo in the article: "*Monkeytpe* won’t let Keen run up the leaderboard". The author is a fsat tpyist.

shever73 5y ago

This reminds me of an old electronic organiser / PDA that was available in the 80s/90s that had just five (I think) keys for typing. Letters were formed by pressing the keys in combination. Skilled users could type very quickly on it. I can't remember the name of it now. "Jaguar" is in my head, but I think I'm conflating it with the Atari console.

jacquesm 5y ago

Is this one of those submarine advertising things?

osullivj 5y ago

I saw the Microwriter [1] demoed at the Nottingham Micro Computer Club forty years ago. Nothing new under the sun! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter

Karliss 5y ago

Anyone here remembers datahand? Both of them seem to have similar input space of 4-5 directions per finger and could use similar input methods for mapping that to actual inputs.

headsoup 5y ago

This is just a PR piece by a guy breaking the rules but saying nah it's OK because my thing I made is cool and you should allow it because I made it.

dwighttk 5y ago

> Monkeytpe won’t let Keen run up the leaderboard, but he did win another typing competition using the CharaChorder to hit 267 WPM with 76% accuracy. Oof. That’s bad. No other mention of accuracy anywhere else.