I always see wpm come up for steno stuff and while it can be faster, that's more of a professional thing. There are three cool things about plover for me. One you get to type pressing more than one or two keys at a time. Two the inputs are sent on key up or release, so can take your time pressing all the letters down, and then release them. Three, you have almost no hand movement at all, so its really, really, really comfortable to type on.
once you get that, you have the steno theories to expand all the words. plover comes with a stened dictionary, but thats just for the words. you can also do phrases, symbols, emoji, macros, and more. once you start adding dictionaries, using a computer becomes a lot more fun. plover is like really crazy layers.
for these, where it says starter, you just press all those keys down, and then on the other side you press the keys listed for what you want. so for example, I can enter like ~104 symbols without moving my hands. the average sybmol layer has like 20. the crossplatform movement dict lets me move around much easier in any text field. (note that you don't really even need to know what the key names you are pressing are as its all a pattern) I currently have six other dictionaries that I use some of the time. you can see more here: https://www.openstenoproject.org/stenodict/.
plover has made using a computer much more fun. its a bit of a hard sell for a lot of people, but I recommend trying out some of the other dictionaries to see what you can do besides type words fast. its seriously really crazy that we are only pressing one key at a time using a keyboard.
I always see wpm come up for steno stuff and while it can be faster, that's more of a professional thing. There are three cool things about plover for me. One you get to type pressing more than one or two keys at a time. Two the inputs are sent on key up or release, so can take your time pressing all the letters down, and then release them. Three, you have almost no hand movement at all, so its really, really, really comfortable to type on.
once you get that, you have the steno theories to expand all the words. plover comes with a stened dictionary, but thats just for the words. you can also do phrases, symbols, emoji, macros, and more. once you start adding dictionaries, using a computer becomes a lot more fun. plover is like really crazy layers.
Now for the other dictionaries, you can do things like: https://steno.sammdot.ca/plover-basics.png https://steno.sammdot.ca/ted-navigation.png https://steno.sammdot.ca/emily-symbols.png
for these, where it says starter, you just press all those keys down, and then on the other side you press the keys listed for what you want. so for example, I can enter like ~104 symbols without moving my hands. the average sybmol layer has like 20. the crossplatform movement dict lets me move around much easier in any text field. (note that you don't really even need to know what the key names you are pressing are as its all a pattern) I currently have six other dictionaries that I use some of the time. you can see more here: https://www.openstenoproject.org/stenodict/.
any cli program would be very easy to add most of the commands to a dictionary if you wanted. for example, a basic git dictionary: https://github.com/didoesdigital/steno-dictionaries/blob/mas...
plover has made using a computer much more fun. its a bit of a hard sell for a lot of people, but I recommend trying out some of the other dictionaries to see what you can do besides type words fast. its seriously really crazy that we are only pressing one key at a time using a keyboard.