here's the thing.. is steno would be a huge investment in "learning" in terms of hours..
if it's not your occupation.. I don't see that paying off much at all.
From what I've read, people get to an average of 120wpm in one semester of learning. I've been using the dvorak layout for 10 years and I'm 70-80wpm. Enjoy your slow typing tp4tissue, I'm not scared to learn something new. I find my brain is always way ahead of my typing and it ruins the flow when I'm writing. "Paying off" in my case would be removing this impediment. I watched some youtube vids of people using Plover and was sold immediately. Why should we have to type every letter if the pc is smart enough to spell out the word for us?
I guess I read your mind as I am considering to do exactly the same thing. The Ergodox keyboard would be nice as then you would be able to use it as a regular keyboard along with plover. But before I make the purchase I too would really like to know how well does the NRKO work. The longest (mis)stroke that I found in the plover dictionary was 14 keypresses long (STKPWHRAOEUPBS: guidelines), so in practice NRKO is needed.
I have already tried plover for some time using Microsoft's sidewinder keyboard, but the problem has been that I have really hard time when I try to hit the middle positions especially for DZ, TS and LG. I have not bothered to buy the keypads that are sold for plover though. Have you given a thought which keypads would be the best considering that you need to press two keys with one finger?
What about the stenosaurus? Have you considered to get it when it will be available?
Damn, I actually didn't realize that you need to hold two keys at once with a single finger. I've only done the first lesson
here, then got frustrated with how uncomfortable it was holding my thumbs so close to the home row and decided to wait until I get my ergodox to do more.
The keys seem so widely spaced on the Stenosaurus, how would you hold two at once? Do you only need to hold two keys along the columns, maybe? I did read something about square cherry MX keycaps, I'll try and find that later but not sure I'll be able to find it, might be hard to search for. I may ask the gurus in the keycap forum later. I'm kind of happy that my ergodox will have brown switches now, should be very easy to hold two down at once with browns...
I did notice from some of the pics that Mirabai posted of the prototype stenosaurus that it used Cherry MX blues.
You could probably dremel and glue up something that works ok for square caps. The ergodox is so customizable that I can't imagine there's many problems that couldn't be adequately solved with a bit of ingenuity.
I had considered the stenosaurus but I thought that it would be limited compared to the ergodox for my purposes. The ergodox has totally customizable layouts which is great. It looks more comfortable than the Stenosaurus to me. Any computer that I'd be using could have the Plover software installed, so I don't really need to have the steno "brains" in the keyboard itself.
Also the Stenosaurus isn't available yet, which is kind of a dealbreaker!! When I look at the blog at
http://stenosaurus.blogspot.com.au/, it doesn't even sound like it's close. They've only just worked out how to load a bootloader by 22nd December 2013. I did see a video on youtube showing the stenosaurus "speaking it's first words", just typing "Plover" into a notepad window when a button is pushed. I noticed that the Plover software was running on the machine though, so the stenosaurus wasn't doing qwerty output, the pc was the "brains". So to my mind, the stenosaurus seems pretty far off.
Stenosaurus would be cool because it can work with any computer without having to install the Plover software though. If I end up becoming attached to steno, which I think I will, I will probably end up buying one anyway.
I should hopefully have my ergodox set up in three weeks time, waiting on parts to arrive atm. I'll try to remember to let you know how it goes. Like I said, I'm a newbie to steno but I'll start on more lessons as soon as it's all set up.
Obviously NKRO will need to work for chorded typing. I know NKRO is meant to work, but are there any problems with ergodox regarding this?
The stock ErgoDox firmware has 6KRO over USB, because it uses PRJC's USB routines which uses the "boot protocol" which has this limitation.
To get full NKRO, you could use Hasu's tmk_keyboard firmware which has support for ErgoDox, but it requires that you build it yourself and some simple C programming to change the layout.
6KRO in this case means that it supports a chord with up to six keys where none is a modifier. The modifiers (Ctrl, Shift, Alt, Windows/Command) will always be recognized because they are separate in this protocol.
I should be ok getting hasu's firmware to work. I have no problem editing some layout files. I'm sure there'll be ok documentation.
not to mention that the muscle memory in a real steno board will be completely different from repurposing an ergodox
That's ok for me because I have no real steno board to have muscle memory for! So I'm starting from scratch! I'll just set it up how I want and change anything that I feel is necessary. that's the advantage in my mind of the ergodox.