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 
) 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).
This is a great video about stenography and about implementing it through open-sourced Plover:
I’ve downloaded Plover and it works so long as you configure it to arpeggiate since the FW13 keyboard doesn’t have NKRO (n key rollover). But you don’t get the true benefit of stenography if you still have to type out ever two letters at a time through arpeggiate.
So what would be best to implement this properly is for FW13 keyboard to have NKRO.
Because of the way laptop membrane keyboards are made it would be pretty hard to make the 13 nkro. Doing that would likely require some extra thickness (probably not a lot though but enough to be kind of a pain).
They have made a relatively low profile nkro keyboard for the 16 but that is still significantly thicker (and maybe more importantly way more expensive) than the mass producible using standard means diodeless matrix they can just hook to the ec.
If they managed to make it fit on the FW16, which has tighter tolerances than the FW13, it should be possible to have a fully NKRO keyboard option for the FW13, no? I would rather purchase an upgraded NKRO keyboard that fits the FW13 than have to buy and carry a separate steno keyboard (which can get pretty expensive on their own).
This may be a stupid question but is there any way to diy this? I expect it will require a completely redesigned keyboard PCB but I assume that can be ordered so long as the design changes needed to make it NKRO are known.
What do you mean by the 16 having tighter tollerances than the 13?
It is definitely not impossible but I doubt it is particularly easy. If framework could somehow get their keyboard manufacturer to stick diodes on the existing matrix (the leds for the backlight/status inidicators are also diodes so from a purely height perspective it should not be impossible but at least the backlight is on a separate layer) all it would take would be (conditionally)removing the anti-ghosting in the ec and boom nkro but judging by afaik noone having done that jet this is either very hard or no manufacturer thinks their customer would pay extra for it.
I kind of doubt you could diy sticking diodes on a carbon pcb but it may be possible to make a custom input cover containing an fw16 input module (hook it up to one of the left over internal usb ports so you don’t have to mess with the ec) and not make it a lot thicker.and then just shimming the hinges up by however thicker you made it.
Framework (at least announcing)releasing the key switches for the 16 should be a relatively big help in that direction but it would still probably be non-trivial as the manufacturing methods used for manufacturing laptop keyboard pcbs aren’t the kind of thing you can just order from jlcpcb and friends (not that you’d want to because pretty much the only upside to those carbon pcbs are being extremely cheap).
What do you mean by the 16 having tighter tollerances than the 13?
I meant that it’s a slimmer profile that they had to fit the keyboard components into in order to fit the deck layout compared to the 13 where there is more room because you don’t have to fit it into as tight of a layout. How is the 16 keyboard fully NKRO without diodes sticking out of it? Can’t that same method be applied to the 13?
As far as I can tell the fw16 keyboard module alone is thicker than the fw13 input cover and that isn’t counting the deck of the fw16 the keyboard module hast to sit on.
The diodes sticking out is likely less of the problem (the backlight and indicators in the 13 is also using diodes just ones that make light and they do seem to fit). They probably can’t attach diodes to a traditional carbon trace keyboard matrix though so that would need a different more expensive process. I have not found a teardown/dissection of the fw16 keyboard to see how it actually ticks internally but it may be possible to apply whatever method they used to add diodes to a laptop keyboard to one for the 13. Would be neat and I would be willing to pay at least a bit extra for it.
Agreed. An NKRO keyboard for the FW13 is on my wish list. I wonder how popular an ortholinear NKRO keyboard would be. I’d settle on an upgraded NKRO keyboard with QMK support but I think an ortholinear NKRO keyboard would be sweet. There’s been some topics about ortholinear keyboards posted for the FW16 ( Is the framework laptop 16 going to have an option for an ortholinear keyboard layout? ) and for the FW13 ( Ortholinear keyboard option? ).
Not sure that’s a big enough improvement to be worth another set of skus.
QMK would be another leap and would make it not a drop in replacement. If they made a whole new input cover they could probably share the usb port of the fingerprint reader using a hub but just making a new keyboard would not be an option there.
