Did you completely miss the last paragraph of my post?

I agree, but as for speed, I still don't think that it can necessarily be traced back the layout alone. In a general sense, I don't think that the layout is the most important factor for speed.

I think you're looking at in the wrong way. I'm not going to switch to steno; I plan on adding it to my skill set. Most of the typing I do doesn't involve names or symbols, and plover allows you to add chords on the fly, so it would take just a few seconds to add names to your dictionary. Just because you learn steno doesn't mean you would have to use it for everything. I only plan on using it for writing in English. For example, I would write this post with steno. I wouldn't use it for symbols. Typing out full urls is inefficient in the first place, but I wouldn't use steno for browsing either.

If you wanted to write in 1337, you could just switch out of plover. Plover admittedly provides a horrible interface for turning it on and off without the use of the mouse. However, I've got around this by setting up a keybinding with sxhdk to start plover running or kill it. I haven't tested how quickly this works, but I suspect it would work okay. Potentially, you could set up a binding to use xdotool to interact with the plover window instead to turn it on and off. This would make it very easy to alternate between the two.

I think steno is a terrible way of doing anything like window management or most programming, but I think if used just for text input like it was designed for, then it can be useful.

Also, my point wasn't that we should all switched to steno; it was that if we all cared only about speed we would.

O.o I spent about 8 hours in the terminal yesterday and do frequently use the shell, but I've never had to type something like that. This could just be because what I do differs from you or other people, but wouldn't you just alias something that long? Steno would be mostly useless for the terminal anyway, since I alias anything I use more than once to a short command. The solution would be to just not use steno for typing something like that.

Er, no. It only shows that your brother can type faster than anyone else in his class (and have you actually measured that, or is that just a guess?). Actually, anyone who bothers to learn how to touch type at all, and practices it, is likely to be faster at typing than most people since most people don't even learn to touch type regardless of layout.

My comment was based on your last paragraph.

Depends on how many of the custom words you've added to the dictionary.

Without adding anything, you may lose a little time on the uncommon characters while the common words are effectively one or two presses.

Also, honestly, I would wonder why you haven't aliased something like that.  It seems a pain to type out regardless of layout.

One thing I realize about me and Vaskozl is that we type several languages. It goes back and forth all day through in my case, Bokmål Norwegian, Nynorsk Norwegian and English and then suddenly bursts of something else (Swedish, German, Icelandic or Greek names or words for instance, or arcane code as in the above example). That throws another monkey wrench into the machinery of dictionaries. I know, I'm a maniac but still – it's fun to be unpredictable! ;D

Yes, that makes sense. Can be useful in coding and whatnot. You could replace <hekate> with " Ἑκάτη " or <thay> with " Thích Nhất Hạnh " for instance, and save yourself a lot of work in the long run. ;)

I might do something like that eventually. For now, I'm pursuing other interests.

If anything, shorthand takes less time than learning a new layout. You just abbreviate a couple of your frequent words. It doesn't have to be 100,000 abbreviations.

Now now, don't be pushy please! ;)

There are a million and one life hacks you can do, and yet very few do them all. Those who do do a whole bunch of them have life hacking as a hobby in itself, like lalop's funny phrase suggests.

I think it's about mental space, which is what I hinted about in my post about the Extend mappings being omni-app omni-state and therefore very easy on the mind despite costing some pinky chord presses.

Right now, my mind is swamped. Swamped at work, swamped at home, swamped concerning typing (my own projects), swamped concerning music, generally too swamped overall. So I don't feel like initiating anything now, but need to land a few balls first.

It's a bit like a chemical reaction: It may release a lot of energy once initiated, but if the activation energy is higher than the available Gibbs free energy then that reaction isn't starting just now except maybe as a trickle.

Text expansion is easy enough to use for things you type a lot like that. For words it takes a lot more memorization. I'm trying it out now to see if it's something I really want to do. I'll add some words I use a lot like this:

iabbr smly similarly
iabbr similarly no

This makes it so that I have to type the shorthand. I'll probably just piss myself off in the long run. If you're going to put that much effort into it I think it might just be a better idea to learn steno. This kind of stuff just doesn't interest everyone.

I'm planning on setting up the list of words you posted in the shorthand thread when I have some time.

It certainly would make using steno more useful if you didn't have to chord anything that could be typed with a single key. Chording alongside normal typing would be very useful as well (letters as modifiers.. virtual layers..). And imagine if plover only came into affect if you chorded with letters. Basic chording stuff shouldn't be too hard to implement with ahk.  That's about as far as I could go. The only thing that I could develop would be the details of the idea itself. I'd love to actually develop an implementation of it, but I'd have to learn a lot more python before I could even understand the plover source code.  That, and the existing tools for doing such things on linux, which I use primarily, are very limited. As for plover, I really don't know how willing the very few people who are working on it would be willing to consider implementing such features.

Also, do you find the default letter placement uncomfortable? Because I do, and I don't think you can change it. My thumbs are too close to my other fingers for it to be comfortable.

Maybe I'll open an issue about one or more or of these things on the github page at some point. And I'll look at the google group.

I finally waded through Shaan's link: http://www.validconcept.com/articles-t9.html

Which talks about the history of T9.  Even after reading that I'm still unsure as to what T9 actually is!

Quote:
Many young people therefore resisted using T9, either "out of habit" or "on principle", even though their slang terms and abbreviations were easily added to T9's dictionary.

When I read that, I thought well actually, the biggest blocker to me using any dictionary on a phone is that I can't be bothered to painfully go through the labour of teaching my phone words in the first place.  Especially if later I can't get that dictionary off of the device.

A better approach would be to load up a dictionary on the device.  And keep it up to date and synchronised across platforms.

Similarly for shorthand and other short cuts.

I too can't be bothered to configure a machine if I'm only going to sit on it for 5 minutes, if the process I deem too unweildy.

Read this, the original paper by the inventors of T9.