The core idea seems to be to map shortcuts to sequences of characters. My experiences suggest that this has promise. Using normal QWERTY, I currently type 160 wpm on average at 95%+ accuracy. I can get up to 180-190 if I risk letting typos through. I noticed that I unconsciously adopted a related idea to the one suggested here: my fingers automatically type out sequences of letters that I'm used to. For example, "-tion" is a common suffix. Instead of typing t, then, i, o, n, my fingers just bang out "tion" as one fluid motion, like a piano scale.
There's a special type of keyboard called steno that takes this further. Instead of typing out individual letters, your keyboard has about 20 keys, and you use "chords" of keys to type entire syllables at a time. Experts can reach upwards of 300 wpm. Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7AFutd9Gos. I tried to do this but it took too much time to learn.
I predicted (incorrectly) that this would just say "Change keyboard layouts".
I actually made myself do that ~5 years ago (to colemak). Ultimately I am not sure if it was worth the effort, but I can tell you that I type at least 40% faster (tested), and typing < 100wpm is a 'bad day'.
Ultimately does it matter? Maybe on slack, but not while I'm coding. To me, learning my editor well (Vim) is where I got my 40% from while coding.
For coding, no. If your typing speed is your bottleneck, you're doing something wrong — either don't use your abstractions the right way and write too much code, or don't know your editor macro engine well enough. Probably both.
But for writing prose? Yes. Being able to type faster gives you more freedom to test more ideas, get more rough material and then edit it out.
I think it goes well beyond 'writing too much code'.
If you're coding at >40wpm sustained, you're basically vomiting out code without a care in the world.
I could see people getting into trouble if they can't manage 30 wpm typing speed, which seems to disagree with what I just said, but coding often comes in little microbursts, and if it takes you too long to get an idea down, you might get distracted by something else and forget what the next step is. I believe there's a law of diminishing returns there, where going from 7 seconds to 6 has a bigger payoff than going from 4 to 3.
Dragon speech recognition (Professional Individual v15) works way faster and far more accurately than I ever thought it would. Keyboard typing actually involves more backspacing over mistakes than Dragon does. Dragon makes 120-200+ wpm effortless whereas 100+ wpm on keyboard requires concentration and is fatiguing. Dragon alas only runs on Windows but it works great inside a VirtualBox VM on Linux and Mac. (The VM setup is a major time commitment though.)
"Dvorak entered his typists into contests, and they consistently out-typed the QWERTYists by a long shot. It got so bad that within a few years, Dvorak typists were banned outright from competing. This decision was overturned not long after, but the resentment remained. QWERTY typists were so unnerved by the speed of the Dvorak typists that Dvorak typewriters were sabotaged, and he had to hire security guards to protect them."
OP here: happy to answer questions about my setup. Just to clarify - the core idea is not shortcuts but how you can use them to integrate changes in your life like reflecting on how you feel or how well you understand your learning material.
"there are very few words in the English language that can be typed with only one hand on the Dvorak keyboard (for the curious, the two are “papaya” and “opaque”)."
Probably needs to be clarified. There are even subsets of "papaya" that can be typed with one hand! e.g. "pay", "yap", "papa".
I used to type 750 words every morning as a daily journaling practice. Kept the habit for 5+ years. Every day, wake up, type 750 words of whatever's on your mind, move on. Takes about 6 minutes.
Over time my typing became fast and reliable enough that it just doesn't need to be any faster. It's as fast as I can think.
Shortcuts slow me down because they don't fit naturally. They cause a hiccup in the brain. A little pause when you think of the right shortcut to use. So I never invested in shortcuts.
But take my ZSH history away and it's like chopping off an arm. Maybe that counts as having a bazillion shortcuts.
This concept intrigues me a lot. Not sure how I could make it work swapping between Windows and Linux, for work and play respectively.
Other things that come to mind are..
+ How would this affect your writing style? How would it affect your vocabulary?
+ If well done, I can see this having a positive impact around purposefully changing the way you write, by making shortcuts for the kinds of words you want to be using vs not using.
+ It is almost like creating another language as a translation/input layer. Could we agree on a mapping for the majority of English words to make this something worth learning? Something that could become common place?
I too type Dvorak on an ortholinear 40% keyboard with a Vim optimised layout[0], and it's the bee's nees.
Unfortunately, both Vim and Dvorak pre-date typical copy (Ctrl+C), cut (Ctrl+X), paste (Ctrl+V). It's not the typing, but these inconveniences that make me think of going with some Colemak variant. Even though both of Vim and Dvorak pre-date dedicated arrow keys, HJKL on Dvorak is still saner than any Colemak layout I've seen so far. I dream about some alternative that strikes a good balance between all of these.
Sure, but I just use One Shot Mods for the most part. So I hit Mods1+C,C and that yeilds Ctrl+C.
I can also add Ctrl keys on the bottom row. The point of SB4DV is for it to work on anything with as few as 33 keys. Adapting it to a 48-key Planck leaves room for extra keys such as these, while the core is the same across different keyboards.
I have been growing my shortcut library since it was added to Apple software. I still don’t do the extreme shortcut stuff that the author talks about though.
However, I do find it somewhat annoying still because often my shortcuts clash with the words that start with the same characters.
I guess the lesson for me is to pick better shortcuts.
Need to make a tool that would check if a given shortcut will collide with a dictionary word.
My worst offender is “atm”, which expands to “at the moment”, but sometimes I need to find an ATM to withdraw some cash :)
I wish I could do this. As an admin, it would be hell on earth for me. Going from one system to another would be all but impossible, especially on systems I can’t make changes like that to. Still a cool idea though!
I would highly recommend leveraging snippet plugins for your editor of choice, something which I imagine would be the coder-flavored version of this articles advice.
The short answer: very extensive systems of phonetic shorthand, a special keyboard with very few keys designed for chorded input (multiple keys pressed simultaneously), and specialised software dictionaries to translate the shorthand back into English. Professional stenographers can type upward of 300wpm as standard.
The downside is that it takes years to become proficient. http://www.openstenoproject.org/ is an interesting resource if you're curious.
They don't type in conventional English, they type in shorthand.
"The stenotype keyboard has far fewer keys than a conventional alphanumeric keyboard. Multiple keys are pressed simultaneously (known as "chording" or "stroking") to spell out whole syllables, words, and phrases with a single hand motion. This system makes real-time transcription practical for court reporting and live closed captioning. Because the keyboard does not contain all the letters of the English alphabet, letter combinations are substituted for the missing letters. There are several schools of thought on how to record various sounds, such as the StenEd, Phoenix, and Magnum Steno theories."
Isn't modern spellcheck/autocorrect basically this? The OP expanded the autocorrect dictionary to include lots of their favorite "misspellings" of words and phrases.
I don't love how much I lean into autocorrect to speed up my typing but maybe I'd feel better about it if it was even more intentional.
I love the shortcuts that force them into the growth and reflection mindsets and I love the questions at the end of the article - better than a tldr.
Wow, I've been annoyed for as long as I've had a smart phone that it never could input my e-mail in an easy way. And then it was this easy all along, thanks!
or whatever to define abbreviations. Honestly I mainly use them to correct things I commonly mistype or if the CapitAliZation of MyCompanyName is annoying.
There's a special type of keyboard called steno that takes this further. Instead of typing out individual letters, your keyboard has about 20 keys, and you use "chords" of keys to type entire syllables at a time. Experts can reach upwards of 300 wpm. Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7AFutd9Gos. I tried to do this but it took too much time to learn.