9 ms·

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
    • mynameisash 5y ago
      J and K are adjacent in Dvorak, and they're down and up, respectively, which makes vertical scrolling just as easy, IMO. I never really used H and L but instead rely on mostly W and B (which aren't adjacent but are close enough). So by happy coincidence, navigating in vim works just fine, I think.
      • opan 5y ago
        Yep, I've never felt the need to remap hjkl for other layouts. Very exaggerated issue from people who didn't stick with it long enough, I think. I was worried about it with Workman because it was slightly less logical. h still left of l, but quite far away, j and k are placed so that it's like you've inverted your camera controls in a game. Very easy to adjust anyway and I don't really think about it now. Your point about w and b is very good as well. Advanced vim users are actually less likely to use hjkl much due to having faster ways to get around in most cases.
      • foxfluff 5y ago
        Yep. I use vim & evil regularly with dvorak. J and K as well as H and L are just fine. H and L are placed very similarly to where they are on qwerty; H is just shifted one position to the right, and L is one position to the right and up. So they still have the "left-right" feel, and I like that H is under the index finger.
    • clove 5y ago
      You can easily and quickly add a Dvorak keyboard to someone else's computer, deleting it once done. I did that all the time when I worked as an editor, having to occasionally edit on clients' computers. The benefit of speed gained from using Dvorak outweighs the inconvenience of having to occasionally add and delete a keyboard on other computers.
      • hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
        Buy a mechanical keyboard with the ability to modify the firmware. I did this and it was worth the $200 price tag. Forgetting to configure computers after finishing with them, not knowing what layout was in use in the login screen, initial configuration, etc all cost time. I also use RDP a lot which is layout roulette (sometimes it changes, sometimes it doesn’t)
    • wutbrodo 5y ago
      > hjkl with Vim using Dvorak was just too hard to get my brain around Why not just remap? My intuition is that the cascading conflict wouldn't be that hard to resolve (at least compared to learning Dvorak...) but maybe I'm wrong.
• gonehome 5y ago
  I'd argue it's a different kind of learning though. QWERTY is more 'what you see is what you get' - you push a key and you get that letter. Sure the layout is weird and learning to type takes some effort, but there's very little additional cognitive load. It's like a WYSIWYG editor. Steno is like Vim, you have to have all of the phrases in your head tracking a lookup table cognitively. Over time sure that becomes muscle memory and lowers the load but I think it's less gradual. You have to frontload a lot of the commands first. IME most people will never do that so it'll always remain niche.
  • aksss 5y ago
    > IME most people will never do that so it'll always remain niche. like vim.. winces in anticipation of things thrown at him
    • aidos 5y ago
      We’re niche, but happy
      • paledot 5y ago
        "We may not be big, but we're small." -The Vinyl Cafe
      • Jorengarenar 5y ago
        Well said. We're niche, but big enough to be self sustainable. The best kind of niche
• SubiculumCode 5y ago
  True, but QWERTY is labeled and obvious how to use. Hence the great number of woodpecking that occurs out there.
  • jejones3141 5y ago
    That's why I got a Dvorak skin for my TypeMatrix keyboard. I know QWERTY well enough I don't have to look for it, and I can switch to Dvorak and be able to peek if need be.
    • elihu 5y ago
      I've been using dvorak for a long time. I kind of wonder if not having a keyboard with the correct dvorak keycaps actually helps learn it faster than it would if you had the correct keycaps? If you can't look at the keys to know what they are, then it encourages touch typing. Still, I can see where it'd be nice to be able to fall back on looking at the keys.
      • foxfluff 5y ago
        Yes, I think not having keycaps helps enormously. Force you to memorize the layout and you can't get lazy about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29837101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29837101
• FpUser 5y ago
  To my shame I've never learned how to type. It does not really impede my coding abilities as it is fast enough to follow my thinking. But if I need to chat online my slowness drives me mad (I assume it does the same to the other party).
  • gonehome 5y ago
    It's worth learning and really doesn't take that much time to get to a decent wpm. It makes it way easier to communicate via text.
  • iainmerrick 5y ago
    It’s worth practicing! I bet it’s not too hard to get reasonably fast in a few weeks. The hardest part will be un-learning any bad habits, but if you reckon you’re currently slow, you probably don’t have too many.
    • FpUser 5y ago
      I've been typing with the same speed for the last 30 years. It is not improving so I really doubt special exercise will do anything but marginal improvement.
      • ipaddr 5y ago
        You would be surprised by hovering your fingers over home row how naturally quickly you will start typing.
      • Hesinde 5y ago
        Don't practice typing faster with your current method, because you already have for 30 years. Rather invest some time to learn a better method. I learned touch typing within a week on holiday vacation with a software similar to this website: https://www.typingstudy.com/ https://www.typingstudy.com/ (Young me felt very proud of being able to type like dad.) Once you have invested the time to learn the basic movements, you will become accustomed to them naturally.
  • 5y ago
• fsckboy 5y ago
  > has a steep learning curve just to make the pedantic point, learning curves show skill improvement plotted against time spent/experience, and therefore a steep learning curve means you learn quickly. A shallow learning curve is the difficult one. /pedantry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve
  • aspenmayer 5y ago
    Your own link explains that the phrase is a misnomer. You’re not pedantic; you’re just mistaken about others being wrong.
    • fsckboy 5y ago
      you have it backwards. the quote that you are referring to, that "a steep learning curve" is a misnomer, means it's a misnomer if by that you mean it's difficult. It's not wrong to say "steep learning curve" if you mean it's easy
      • aspenmayer 5y ago
        That’s not how the phrase is used colloquially. You’re not even wrong, but your prescriptivism is at odds with common parlance.
        • fsckboy 5y ago
          you were incorrect to describe the wikipedia article as backing your point. I self labelled as pedantic and pointed to an explanation, that does not make me a prescriptivist, it makes me didactic.
          • aspenmayer 5y ago
            > you were incorrect to describe the wikipedia article as backing your point. I’m not relying on the Wikipedia article to support my claims. I’m relying on my native English language usage. I have literally never heard anyone in my life use the phrase “steep learning curve” in the way you use it. Not even once. However, I could have heard it in an ambiguous context and assumed that the speaker or writer intended to use it in the way that you do. I’ll admit, in that case, that I may have heard it used the same way you do, and assumed that they mean to use it in the way I do. I am not making personal attacks here, so I hope I didn’t offend, not to suggest that your disagreement implies offense. If I did, I sincerely apologize. I wonder if this is a case of certain phrases just being imprecise or ambiguous enough to be difficult to use in conversation or writing. For example, suppose I applied some wax to a polished wood floor, way more than I thought I did or meant to apply originally. Suddenly, you walk in from the next room or down the hall. I stop you before you slip and fall on the excess wax, saying, “Wait, I spilled a deceptively [small | large] amount of wax on the floor, and I haven’t cleaned it up yet.” You stop in time, and don’t slip. I clean up the wax, and all is well. If all you have is my single sentence to go on, whether I had said that I spilled a deceptively large or deceptively small amount of wax on the floor, and no additional context to know that I spilled too much wax on the floor, you might deduce from context that there must be too much wax, thus leading to a slipping hazard. Now we’re having coffee later and I’m telling you about my vacation, and all the new flora and fauna I saw. I tell you about seeing a rare and elusive jabberwocky, and I told you it was deceptively [small | large]. Without further elaboration or context, you may struggle to deduce whether I mean that the jabberwocky is smaller or larger than expected or than it appeared, or both, or simply that it was smaller or larger than expected for jabberwockies, given just that single sentence. Does that make sense? I used jabberwockies because they are literary creatures that do not exist in real life. You can replace them in the example with anything which you, the hypothetical listener or reader, is unfamiliar with enough to not know how small or large they are in relation to other referent in my vacation story, or anything else I was comparing it with in that context. It appears that we can both be right, depending on usage and context. You may not agree, and seem not to; I find my usage appropriate for the contexts I use it in, and clarify with supporting statements in context so as to not confuse others, because I know that this phrase is used in both ways colloquially and mathematically. To the degree that you insist that the phrase “steep learning curve” only has the one meaning you describe and use, I call your insistence prescriptivist. If you deny that others use the phrase correctly when they use it in ways that make sense, given the knowledge of how other people use it in ways that differ to your own, I would call that denial pedantic, and not didactic, but instead quirky, but otherwise okay, as long as we both understand what we each mean, and otherwise understand each other’s meaning and context. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6209/what-is-meant-by-steep-learning-curve https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6209/what-is-mea... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky
• jcrawfordor 5y ago
  A significant difference between a conventional keyboard and steno is that a conventional keyboard is capable of producing all the of the text we normally type, and a steno machine is not. A necessary part of stenotype is a combination of pre-work (dictionary development for e.g. proper names) and post-work (editing the steno transcript to produce a "real English" document instead of one that may only have the generally correct sounds). Modern steno software helps a lot by partially automating these steps but steno is still inherently not capable of producing correct spelling without manual assistance - the basic architecture of steno is that you type the phonemes and (in modern usage) software guesses the correct spelling based on a dictionary. Much of the speed advantage of steno comes from the basic fact that it is a "lossy" process in the information-theoretic sense, that is, the "text" that you enter does not contain spelling information, only pronunciation... and even pronunciation is sometimes a simplified or substitute form as the American steno machine can't represent all of the phonemes that see use in English (mostly due to borrow words). In the end, steno itself is probably not a lot harder to learn than QWERTY (although I think more frustrating because the "hunt and peck" option for steno is less intuitive and often slower). But it requires sort of a "supporting ecosystem" of skills and tools that is more complex and not amenable to use cases other than natural language. That makes it much less attractive for general use.
  • voxl 5y ago
    CharaCorder is not a stenograph, individual character entry is supported, just like a normal qwerty keyboard.
    • xupybd 5y ago
      Yeah but you are not going to get the speeds they boast about without steno.
      • Xevi 5y ago
        I'm not the one you responded to, but I just wanted to add that it's still not steno. CharaChorder just has chording, but no theories, or whatever you call them for steno. You basically have to memorize every single chord on the CharaChorder afaik.
• NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Mmmhm not sure I'd agree. Initial learning curve is practically non-existent - Anybody can type a letter "A" or a word or a sentence on a QWERTY by looking and poking. It is not my understanding that I could do ANYthing on a stenography device without significant, serious training.
  • a9h74j 5y ago
    So-called discoverability is certainly one important metric.
• hannasanarion 5y ago
  The learning curve for stenography is much higher. With a keyboard, the buttons do exactly what they say and that only. With a stenography machine, every possible combination of buttons does a different thing. When typing the word "Unprepared" on a keyboard, you just have to look at the buttons and find each of the ones with those labels, and hit them in sequence. To type the word "Unprepared" on a steno machine, you need to hit the buttons UPB all at once and then PRAOEPD all at once, knowing that PB is a combo that means N, that the UPB set assumes that it's a prefix to whatever follows, that AOE represents the vowel sound /i/, and that your software understands the input "preepd" to be a shorthand for 'prepared'. You can try it out with your regular keyboard in the browser here: http://www.openstenoproject.org/demo/ http://www.openstenoproject.org/demo/
  • megous 5y ago
    Keyboards that use multiplexed row/column electrical matrix will not allow you to detect more than two keys in any box pattern simultaneously. So pressing more than two keys on that virtual steno keyboard is impossible on a regular keyboard (for many key combinations).
    • hannasanarion 5y ago
      The software has a workaround to account for that, as long as you keep one key held down, the "stroke" isn't considered finished. Obviously if you're gonna use it as you daily driver, you'd want to get a NKRO keyboard, but the "hold one key and tap the rest" trick works for the web demo.
      • megous 5y ago
        Ah, nice, I didn't notice that while trying to use it. :)
    • tinus_hn 5y ago
      This was solved decades ago by simply pulsing the rows in sequence and reading the columns for each row. You can trivially do that hundreds of times per second.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• bee_rider 5y ago
  I, and I think many other people, didn't really 'work' at learning to type. We just practiced as a side effect of using the computer rather than, say, taking typing lessons. For someone like me, QWERTY has a difficulty curve. I think seno technically wouldn't have a curve. The inability to hunt and peck means that without explicitly setting aside time to train in steno, there isn't any way to make real progress. Mathematically, a curve should not contain discontinuities!
  • rightbyte 5y ago
    I never learned to write on a keyboard in a controlled way and I still can't 'touch type' naturally. I tried to learn in, but I always fall back to my old habits since my right hand hurt otherwise. I don't think I will ever bother getting fast. It is probably way better to learn it properly from the beginning.
    • dntrkv 5y ago
      A while back I decided to fix some of my bad keyboard habits. I forget the software I used, but it took me about 2 weeks of daily 15 minute practice to fix many of my bad habits and improve my typing skills in general. I’ve been thinking about doing it again because I still have some remaining bad habits, especially with the pinkies. Well worth the effort, at least for me.
      • rightbyte 5y ago
        I did about the same and I got alot better, but I think I need to practice a bit more to not fall back when I don't think about it.
    • bee_rider 5y ago
      For some reason whenever I try to touch type 'correctly' I make typos. But I do get most of my fingers in play when typing normally. I just have a weird stance -- left index on f, right middle on j, right pinky on p. Index and middle fingers do a little extra work, left pinky is mostly reserved for control keys -- esc, crtl... I dunno. I don't have anywhere near 60 words per minute that are actually worth recording.
• Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  I'm not sure the learning curve is all that steep. I learned it as part of a "keyboarding" class around... 1989 or something (I was in middle school). Learning to type was only a small portion of the class, and it happily included games and letter art alongside the learning. Best class I took because of touch typing. On the other hand, I have plenty of peers that type nearly as quickly using two fingers or simply by doing years of using a computer. People learn the layout with use. It is easy enough that switching from a standard American keyboard to a Norwegian keyboard (whose alphabet has 3 more letters in addition to some other European language letters and punctuation) was a non-issue.
• ashtonkem 5y ago
  I think the best argument for things other than QWERTY nowadays is ergonomics, not speed. RSI is no joke.
  • opan 5y ago
    Agreed. I've never gotten back to my old qwerty speeds of up to 160wpm since relearning proper homerow on a split keyboard, then later learning Dvorak, then again later learning Workman. I'm in a lot less pain, though, and I'm still generally above 120wpm at least. FYI I didn't switch off of Dvorak because I was bored of it, I'd traded my left hand pain for right hand pain, and I decided it was a bit worse. Workman is more evenly split between hands where both qwerty and Dvorak had a major bias. Workman also seems to beat Dvorak and Colemak in efficiency, but if that were my main concern, I also considered qgmlwb and Halmak, which IIRC are even better.
• missblit 5y ago
  Every time I get a new laptop I have to adjust my muscle memory since their layouts vary so much :( still can't type the upper right letters consistently on my current laptop.
• fivea 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. This assertion ignores crucial differences in the basic mechanics of typing in a standard QWERTY keyboard (i.e., look at the keyboard, press one key, get the desired character) and using a stenograph/chorded keyboard. A standard keyboard's discoverability makes it incomparably easier to ramp up than guessing which key combos get you a specific character combo/word.