Suggestions on special characters for a beginner?

[kleinphi]

This is my situation: I have zero knowledge of steno. Since I'm going
to have to learn from scratch, I might as well use the default
dictionary. I may be wrong, but most special characters, such as ()_=+
\^&%*@~, don't seem to be in the dictionary. Could someone maybe offer
suggestions on how to best define them? I don't necessarily want to
develop my own system from my current vantage point of complete
ignorance and start training on it only to have it turn out to be a
huge pain at higher speeds.

Ideally I would like to use steno for everything: writing email,
LaTeX, C, or editing my .fvwm2rc. Is this maybe the wrong approach
altogether? Should I be using steno only for certain tasks, but not
others? How do you gals/guys use Plover in real life? By the way,
after trying for a few hours to find a good way of toggling Plover on/
off without using the mouse, I settled on simply adding the following
line to my .fvwm2rc:

Key F12 A N All (Plover:*) FakeKeypress press space

Now F12 (which I don't use for anything else and doesn't seem to cause
any side effects in my applications) toggles Plover, no matter what
the active window may be.

There is one more idea I would like to run by you: I noticed lots of
keyboards seem to allow me to press all 8 home row keys at the same
time or all the 8 keys directly above them, or even a combination of
home row keys and those directly above them, as long as it's just one
key per finger. Do you think it would be worthwhile to create a
totally new chording system that uses just such strokes (that are
possible on the majority of keyboards)? To me it wouldn't make that
much of a difference as I have no training or experience yet. I could
easily implement this by simply writing a Plover dictionary from
scratch. Feel free to give me your honest opinion. I won't take it
personally; I'm basically brainstorming, but totally lack the
experience to assess the potential value of this idea.

[Fubrite]

On Feb 20, 4:14 am, kleinphi <klein...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is my situation: I have zero knowledge of steno. Since I'm going
> to have to learn from scratch, I might as well use the default
> dictionary. I may be wrong, but most special characters, such as ()_=+
> \^&%*@~, don't seem to be in the dictionary. Could someone maybe offer
> suggestions on how to best define them? I don't necessarily want to
> develop my own system from my current vantage point of complete
> ignorance and start training on it only to have it turn out to be a
> huge pain at higher speeds.

Hi,

I've only been using Plover myself for a short time, but here's my
2p's worth - however you define them, make sure they're memorable in
some way. For instance, I've defined brackets as:

"BR*L": "{(}",
"BR*R": "{)}",

I'm hoping that Plover will eventually enable the use of other keys on
the keyboard, so we can use the special character keys natively, just
like a normal keyboard. To me, that would be the best of both worlds.

With regards toggling Plover on and off, with the newest version, you
can define a hotkey (hotchord?) in the Plover dictionary itself to do
this. I use:

"P*BGS": "{PLOVER:QUIT}",
"P*L": "{PLOVER:TOGGLE}",

Hope this helps!

Stefan

[Mirabai Knight]

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 11:14 PM, kleinphi <klei...@gmail.com> wrote:

This is my situation: I have zero knowledge of steno. Since I'm going
to have to learn from scratch, I might as well use the default
dictionary. I may be wrong, but most special characters, such as ()_=+
\^&%*@~, don't seem to be in the dictionary. Could someone maybe offer
suggestions on how to best define them? I don't necessarily want to
develop my own system from my current vantage point of complete
ignorance and start training on it only to have it turn out to be a
huge pain at higher speeds.

I don't have strokes for all of these, but here's what I use for the ones I do have. Not sure if all of these are in the default dictionary; some might only be in my personal non-Plover dictionary.

( - PREPB

) - PR*EPBT

= - KWA*LS

% - PERS

~ - T*LD

_ - *RUPBD

+ - PHR*US

* - STA*R

Off the top of my head, I'd probably define the others as:

\ - PWHR*S

^ - KRT

@ - TA*T

Ideally I would like to use steno for everything: writing email,
LaTeX, C, or editing my .fvwm2rc. Is this maybe the wrong approach
altogether? Should I be using steno only for certain tasks, but not
others? How do you gals/guys use Plover in real life?

I definitely want to start using Plover for everything. It's the first steno software that actually allows for that kind of low-level interaction with the operating system, so I don't think there's anyone using it as a universal text input system yet, but I definitely want that to be an option, and I intend to start weaning myself away from the qwerty keyboard for daily computing tasks as much as possible.

 

There is one more idea I would like to run by you: I noticed lots of
keyboards seem to allow me to press all 8 home row keys at the same
time or all the 8 keys directly above them, or even a combination of
home row keys and those directly above them, as long as it's just one
key per finger. Do you think it would be worthwhile to create a
totally new chording system that uses just such strokes (that are
possible on the majority of keyboards)? 

To me the two big advantages about using steno chords for commands rather than going outside the steno layout is that, one, you can keep your hands in the same position and not have to be drifting all around the keyboard to do stuff, and, two, once we get low-cost steno hardware commercially available, you'll be able to do away with the qwerty keyboard altogether. This is particularly useful for mobile computing, where the steno keyboard layout is compact enough to fit on a wearable system, while the qwerty layout emphatically is not. (Viz: This article, which mentions jeans that have been around for years now -- I cited them in my Mobile and Wearable section of What is Steno Good for -- but which are way, way too dorky and impractical to be anything other than ridiculous novelties: http://www.pcworld.com/article/250242/these_pants_have_a_builtin_keyboard_may_draw_funny_looks.html )