I’ve been fascinated by the idea of stenography and Plover for a while; typing a single character at a time can seem inefficient since I know I’m capable of thinking in syllables. I do feel like “I don’t know what I don’t know” about this though - surely this is extraordinarily challenging to pick up!
I see there is a Model 01 plugin for this, and wonder if either git contributor (@jesse@algernon) have gotten far with this? I’d love to see a video of this in action. I feel like I’ll be comfortable with the daily use of this new hardware in the next few months to try this myself!
I haven’t gotten far, unfortunately. I memorized a few simple things, but my speed is abysmal even if I type the words I know. I always tell myself that one of these days, I’ll start practicing Steno more, but in the end, never get around to it. Perhaps once I have a little more time, I’ll be able to! Until then, it will remain a goal to achieve. Plover has some very good resources on getting started, by the way.
Do you want a video of the Model01 in action, or would any keyboard work, as long as the same steno method is used? Mirabai Knight (Plover’s designer) has a few, very interesting videos:
And the talk that sparked my interest in Steno (it wasn’t hard to spark, my late Grandmother used to be a typist & stenographer):
In this initial getting the keyboard and learning how to use it (and getting into customizing it to adjust all those things that suddenly feel wrong because you got used to them over the years) stumbled upon plover again. This seems like this might be a better thing to learn than a different keyboard layout like Dvorak, Colemak or Workman, as I’d be able to keep being able to use other people’s computers.
I took a stab at adding this to my firmware, (sloppily removing a toggle layer in the same commit), but it’s not working yet. There are however a couple interesting quirks; depressing just the right fn key will activate the LED on the second LockLayer key!
My question is about the steno example in the arduino library: that default keymap should work as listed correct? Like despite all my Colemak stuff I believe this layer will match the qwerty examples in the docs, and a chord in the Getting Started doc would be on the qwerty keycaps RNO to make ‘hel’. Currently nothing happens once I go to this layer.
The keymap in the example is different (IMHO better!) than the standard Plover QWERTY layout. The homerow (QWERTY’s asdfjkl;) is the top row of Plover, the row below (QWERTY’s zxcvm,./) is the bottom row of Plover, and the outer thumb keys (“cmd” and “shift” on the left, “shift” and “alt” on the right with QWERTY’s default legends) are the vowel keys. So, ‘hel’ is f-rshift-l.
Also as a sanity check, make sure Plover is running and activated before trying to type on the Steno layer, otherwise it won’t do anything.
lololol. Ok, run the plover app. That’s funny. It may be working now, I wish I had more time to play now. Hitting the qwerty labels of X+M spit out the word ‘you’ and C+M was ‘awe’ which is what I feel. I am seriously stoked to dig into this!
So in Plover once I went into configuration and selected Gemini PR on the USB Port I was able to get the layer working well. All the documentation is hard to parse because the mappings are off by a row. Add to this the fact that I’ve been using only Colemak for nearly 3 years and it is a mental exercise! I plan to make a graphical aid for my fellow Model 01 would-be stenographers.
In the mean time, what I was able to tinker out (without reading any instructions, just mashing around after making my own crude guide):
to type the words “key board”:
the qwerty mappings (the steno mappings)
X+CMD+Right Shift (KAE)
D+C+CMD+Right Shift+M+" (PWAORD)
tab is a backspace key.
I’ve got to actually read the docs now. I found some Anki flashcards I may queue up, and a bunch of questions to answer. Thought I’d share my progress.
I’ve found the Learn Plover “book”/guide to be a good gentle/gradual introduction to Plover. It doesn’t assume any particular mapping, but shows things in terms of the steno keyboard (which I find easy to mentally map to the Model 01, at least myself).
Re: LED scheme, check out the Colormap plugin I think.
Tiny correction for anyone else following along, “board” (PWAORD) uses Left Shift not Right Shift.
Im struggling to follow along here. I edited my firmware to look like arley, but plover doesn’t seem to recognize my keyboard in geminipr mode. any hints?
turns out im an idiot and didn’t look at the configure button in plover. For future reference, if you have multiple serial ports connected make sure that plover is looking at the right one.
The Atreus hardware layout seems uniquely suited to learning steno and I have been giving it a good several hours setting it up. I have set up a layer following the keyboard layout as set out in the Plover book. Was confused for a bit why it wasn’t spelling what I was trying to write until I dug around in the configure button and manually remapped the keys to the steno layout I had copied verbatim to it’s own layer, which had the funny impact of remapping K to K and also learning via trial and error that there is a chirality to some of the consonants.
Obviously quite inefficient, especially if I intend to set up Plover on another computer and will have to remap the keys in the software. Any tips from Plover veterans?
Yep. Caught me off guard when I realised what was going on. I had reprogrammed the keyboard according to the diagram in the Plover ebook.
In Plover, here’s what the keymapping looks like, after I had fiddled with it to match the keymap I had written out. Some of the qwerty specific mapping remains.
Anyway, I ended up re-exploring the other key-id options in Chrysalis and realised it did have a category called “Steno” and I have now created an entire layer from it. But Plover does not seem to detect it? Though this seems like the most elegant option if I want to move to another workstation and for setup, I just need to be able to toggle something to get it working.
In between stumbling around, I found enough time to go through the Steno lessons and I find myself absurdly excited about going 100 WPM potentially. So if I can get this working, this may serve as a pretty awesome conversational keyboard, with my conventional layout available for coding and other uses.
The default Plover setup rightly assumes most people own a QWERTY keyboard so matches the keymaps of a steno keyboard to it. It however, also rightly does not predict some random person would be able to easily reprogram their keyboard to the exact visible layout for a steno keyboard. So in the end, I had to manually adjust all the letters to match their counterparts, which leads to your second question.
What are the -P and P- ?
“P-” means the “P” key on the left, and “-P” means “P” on the right. So what you see on a Steno keyboard is apparently not always what you get.
I looked into Plover a little but was disappointed when it looked like you had to memorize long lists of words and their codes.
One of the first exercises in the Plover book is them giving out strings of one syllable words and letting you try to figure out how they work. After a while I started getting the logic of it. It matters more how they sound like rather than how they are spelled. Besides, it’s already based on a language I am fluent in so it’s not too difficult compared to learning an entirely new language.
Now that I think about it, I am starting to get why my Chinese input method supports a pinyin input method that now makes sense as a steno-like method of character input.
I figured out how to get the setup properly working thanks to an Atreus user (Thai) in the Plover discord community. I will write it here just in case anyone wants to give it a shot and is a complete newbie to this like I am.
To get a proper Steno keycode layer working, I needed to activate the Steno plugin. I found the directions here in the Kaleidoscope documentation for Steno.
I then defined a layer in Plover. This is what my current iteration looks like, which thanks to the superb reprogrammable nature of the Keyboardio keyboards, I used the corner buttons to represent S(A) and S(U) respectively.
In Plover, I configured the machine as Gemini PR. The baudrate seems fine on the default setting, though because Thai set it at 115200 I gave it a shot as well. Afterwards, I turned on the virtual Paper Tape in Plover and switched to the Steno layer. When I saw the output in the Paper Tape I knew I had set it up properly.
Right, that’s how it starts, but as you go on and to get the higher speeds, you have to learn a whole dictionary of shortcuts and exceptions and special cases. Typing everything phonetically is just the beginning.
The main advantage of this explicit support in Chrysalis / Kaleidoscope (e.g. the _L and _R and N#keys from the “Steno” section) is listed at the top of the docs:
No need to toggle Plover on and off, because the normal keys are not taken over by Plover anymore.
This allows me to type e.g. Dvorak on the keyboard on my laptop, and Steno on the external plugged in to my laptop (a Moonlander), without toggling any settings!
However, I can’t seem to get my Atreus to work with GeminiPR / Plover (on a newish MacBook Pro)… any advice is welcome!
My workflow is to plug in the keyboard, then open Plover, Configure, go to the Machine tab, the Machine tab shows “Gemini PR” and under the Port field I click the Scan button and then select /dev/cu.usbmodemCatreusE1 (Baudrate defaults to 9600 and I leave it alone), then click OK and ensure the Output toggle is on Enabled. (This is the same workflow which is effective with my Moonlander.)
