6 ms·

Typing source code with Plover is possible, but so far there have been lots of reports of unexpected whitespace. I think the ultimate test for plover is to beat

by kanzure 12y ago

Typing source code with Plover is possible, but so far there have been lots of reports of unexpected whitespace. I think the ultimate test for plover is to beat something like the 23 minutes 28 seconds qwerty record on http://www.ioccc.org/2013/cable3/cable3.c http://www.ioccc.org/2013/cable3/cable3.c with less keystrokes overall. IOCCC can be seen as an absolute worst case scenario for the sorts of code that might be encountered in day-to-day programming. So if a somewhat experienced Plover user can handle IOCCC without a problem, then programmers are in the clear. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ploversteno/KJ2OcDqboCc/5iLncrRLrqsJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ploversteno/KJ2OcDqboCc/5iLn... https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ploversteno/KJ2OcDqboCc/GPWUpH9zFQMJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ploversteno/KJ2OcDqboCc/GPWU... Meanwhile I have been working on reverse engineering the proprietary USB protocol for the Elan Cybra steno machine... http://cdn2.bigcommerce.com/server1400/803d4/products/3527/images/3350/cybra1__94816.1410577774.1280.1280.jpg?c=2 http://cdn2.bigcommerce.com/server1400/803d4/products/3527/i...

tomjen3 12y ago
I am not sure it would be a fair test. I type a lot faster on my phone with a predictive keyboard for normal day to day typing, but it wouldn't work very well with just semi random letters.
swalsh 12y ago
I think its great that this might be used to help people with disabilities. It doesn't seem great for programmers. There have been very few times where the bottleneck in my productivity was how fast I can type text. I spend a lot more time thinking. The keyboard shortcut thing in vim is cool though.
- kanzure 12y ago
  > It doesn't seem great for programmers. Well, what would it take to make it great for programmers? My primary concern at the moment is the excess whitespace it often adds after every keypress. Exact typing is very important to me when I am writing code. Are there other issues you're concerned about? I think that ultimately everyone spends more time thinking than literally anything else in the world, including qwerty typing, so "I spend more time thinking" doesn't seem like a meaningful observation to make. Even a 1% improvement in typing rate applied globally, across all forms of work that might even trivially involve typing, can save millions of hours per year of labor. Wait, let's check. Assume 500 million qwerty typists. Assume an average of 10 minutes per day spent typing every day for a year by everyone. So a 1% improvement would be 34,700 years of labor saved over a single year? Pretty cool. Edit: yeah so it occurs to me that I shouldn't estimate 500 million qwerty users. Hmm. Maybe it would be better to estimate based on "75% of cellphone users worldwide send text messages" multiplied by maybe uh 1.5 billion users. So anyway, at least 1 billion typists (although not qwerty-specifically, cellphone typing is dramatically slower, so is safe to use here).
nkurz 12y ago
Do you have more information about that record? At a glance it strikes me as surprisingly slow, but maybe I don't understand the ground rules. (I'm not implying that I could do faster, only that it seems slow compared to other typing speed records)
- kanzure 12y ago
  Hah, excellent question. So, that fastest time was just me typing it up on qwerty. I would be fascinated to hear some suggestions for ground rules. Although.... I'm not the slowest: http://www.seanwrona.com/typeracer/profile.php?username=kanzure http://www.seanwrona.com/typeracer/profile.php?username=kanz... (so this might distort the results either positively or negatively) (also my background as a programmer might make IOCCC code look nearly legible) I wanted to give a baseline so that when someone tried using Plover to type it, there would be at least one number to compare against.

by kanzure 12y ago

tomjen3 12y ago

I am not sure it would be a fair test. I type a lot faster on my phone with a predictive keyboard for normal day to day typing, but it wouldn't work very well with just semi random letters.

swalsh 12y ago

I think its great that this might be used to help people with disabilities. It doesn't seem great for programmers. There have been very few times where the bottleneck in my productivity was how fast I can type text. I spend a lot more time thinking. The keyboard shortcut thing in vim is cool though.

kanzure 12y ago
> It doesn't seem great for programmers. Well, what would it take to make it great for programmers? My primary concern at the moment is the excess whitespace it often adds after every keypress. Exact typing is very important to me when I am writing code. Are there other issues you're concerned about? I think that ultimately everyone spends more time thinking than literally anything else in the world, including qwerty typing, so "I spend more time thinking" doesn't seem like a meaningful observation to make. Even a 1% improvement in typing rate applied globally, across all forms of work that might even trivially involve typing, can save millions of hours per year of labor. Wait, let's check. Assume 500 million qwerty typists. Assume an average of 10 minutes per day spent typing every day for a year by everyone. So a 1% improvement would be 34,700 years of labor saved over a single year? Pretty cool. Edit: yeah so it occurs to me that I shouldn't estimate 500 million qwerty users. Hmm. Maybe it would be better to estimate based on "75% of cellphone users worldwide send text messages" multiplied by maybe uh 1.5 billion users. So anyway, at least 1 billion typists (although not qwerty-specifically, cellphone typing is dramatically slower, so is safe to use here).

nkurz 12y ago

Do you have more information about that record? At a glance it strikes me as surprisingly slow, but maybe I don't understand the ground rules. (I'm not implying that I could do faster, only that it seems slow compared to other typing speed records)

kanzure 12y ago
Hah, excellent question. So, that fastest time was just me typing it up on qwerty. I would be fascinated to hear some suggestions for ground rules. Although.... I'm not the slowest: http://www.seanwrona.com/typeracer/profile.php?username=kanzure http://www.seanwrona.com/typeracer/profile.php?username=kanz... (so this might distort the results either positively or negatively) (also my background as a programmer might make IOCCC code look nearly legible) I wanted to give a baseline so that when someone tried using Plover to type it, there would be at least one number to compare against.