Steno keyboard - a FW laptop with fastest typing keyboard

I’ve wanted a steno keyboard but the commercial ones are expensive and not at all practical. If it’s embedded into my FW13 then it’s worth the price. I want to be able to have a steno keyboard on top and a qwerty keyboard on bottom in one keyboard layout and to have the ability to switch between the two so that when I need to type quickly I can use steno keyboard and when I’m coding something technical until I figure out how to do it in steno, I can use the qwerty keyboard.

I understand stenography keyboard software won’t be as easy as switching keyboard layouts and you would want to sell a certain quota to justify making the keyboard viable but having a Framework version of a steno keyboard will allow the Framework 13 to have the fastest typing keyboard possible (since with a steno keyboard you type by words unlike conventional keyboards which type by letters).

I wonder if there’s anyone else out there interested in a steno keyboard on their FW laptops, regardless of whether or not they have any experience with it.


Image source: Beginner's Guide - Plover Wiki

I remember when DVORAK used to be edgy…

I know there is some software that can remap all the keys at a software level, but where the OS follows the custom layout (as unfortunately only the FW16 keyboards run QMK on an RP2040 :frowning: ) I forgot the name of the software though, so im not much help hah

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The thing that makes stenography different is that as you can see there are a lot of letters missing and that’s because you type phonetically each word by pressing multiple keys at once. So you press E and U to write ‘I’. To write the word ‘test’, you press t, e, and s at the same time. ‘Cat’ is k, a, t at the same time. It only takes one synchronized motion to type one word. Once you get the hang of it, you can imagine that typing by words would be substantially faster than typing by letters.

See Mark Kislingbury World Record 370wpm with 95.4% accuracy using stenography (https://youtu.be/nETlhthG22Q?si=1XA-j3_XUm3siXos).