Key placement

I'm not terribly satisfied with the location of the vowel keys on the Sidewinder. I really like the Sidewinder in general, and of course on Day Nine it's difficult really to estimate how well I'm going to end up liking the keyboard layout - but getting my thumbs onto the lower row of letter keys feels very cramped and uncomfortable.

So here's my idea: add some very flat keys or buttons below the spacebar, right where my thumbs want to land. Those four could even simply mirror the CVNM keys currently mapped by Plover to AOEU. At most you'd need an Arduino and USB port to get the keystrokes into the computer, and if the keys were flat enough they could simply be glued onto the nice little ergonomic shelf under the Sidewinder.

It's a thought.

Learning Steno: Day Seven

I got back on the horse today, after two days of being too busy. On the theory that almost knowing a chord will train me better, I turned off keyboard highlighting and chord display right from the start - and surprised myself by knowing about 80% of the letters without needing a hint. So on letters, I'm at 14 wpm and 94% accuracy in Fly. I call that really not too shabby after a single week, and I have nearly all of them memorized, actually. Amazing! Another week in this mode and I'm going to look harder at briefs.

For laughs, I took a look at Stenotypy (1914) in Google Books, and fired up Plover in a text window. Mirabai's right, the introduction is a pretty useful read, but the briefs (what I think they call the theory) are all different. So their exercises are useless with Plover. Ah well. It's still worth reading, if only because it dates from 1914 and was published in Indiana.

Here's a notion: let Plover know which windows it should be doing stenography in, and which it shouldn't. Just a thought.