Plover: Thought to Text at 240 WPM
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN's standard reference when typing speed, ergonomics, or alternative input comes up, for its live demo and the open-source steno ecosystem.
What it is
Mirabai Knight's PyCon 2013 talk on Plover, a free cross-platform stenography engine that lets people write at up to 240 WPM on ordinary hardware, including a demo of coding by steno.
Recommended by 8 HN commenters across 8 different months, 2014 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec jarmitage · 2021-06 · on “Plover is a free, open-source stenography engine”
Mirabai Knight's talk about this is one of my all time faves: [this video] Inspired me to try to create a live coding musical instrument based on it: [LINK] / [LINK]
Strong rec zeta0134 · 2023-04 · on “Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard”
Yes! Here is a really great talk on the state of doing so, with a fantastic realtime demo near the end. Mirabai live-codes using her Plover setup and narrates her thought process as she types out each command. [this video]
Recommends 3rd3 · 2014-01 · on “DataHand”
There is an open source stenography project called "Plover". The idea of stenotype is instead of typing individual letters one combines keys to form sillables (or commands), what makes typing blazingly fast (240 WPM in the video below) and is overall a less cramped movement, because after each sillable you can relax instead of keeping muscles tensed for each letter. [LINK] Talk: [this video] Demo: [LINK]
Recommends vanderZwan · 2014-07 · on “One year with Colemak”
Stenography might also be an option: [LINK] Here's a video by the stenographer half of the duo that started the project: [this video]
Recommends gcr · 2016-09 · on “Ask HN: How did you keep improving your typing speed after 100 WPM?”
Court reporters are required to type at 240WPM with zero mistakes, or they lose their court reporting license. You can teach yourself to use a stenography machine. You can build your own steno machine with some open-source software and a fancy gaming keyboard. See this video by Mirabai Knight and the Plover project: [this video] I wanted to try this but I couldn't stick with it.
Recommends linsomniac · 2020-06 · on “Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)”
Here's a good PyCon presentation from someone who switched to voice input for programming. [this video] I hadn't thought about it until this thread, but one of the biggest barriers for me using it was that we have a really quiet open office, but now that we are WFH...
Recommends JZL003 · 2021-09 · on “Ask HN: Any good text-to-speech solutions for someone who cannot talk normally?”
I personally like ibm tts slightly more than Google although it is more expensive. I think Google, but definitely other startups also allow you to train the model to be closer to your voice. Since you might have many recordings of yourself before this, could be cool. Comment if you can't find it and I can look It's none of my business how long term it is, but if it is long term look into stenography, especially open source opensteno and plover. Old talk but [this video] It's what court reporters use to transcribe at the speed of text but for you it could mean giving text into a tts software at the speed of normal talking. I've only tried it briefly but if you take the time to learn it, you can co
Recommends melling · 2023-01 · on “Plover”
Over the past decade there have been some interesting discussions about Plover on HN [LINK] The video in the first result was good: [this video]