Ploverwinder takes flight!

I have to edit an entire play script tonight (I'm captioning a matinee tomorrow), so I don't have much time for a long post, but I just wanted to show off the fruit of this morning's labors. Some lovely people in the #python IRC channel gave me a brilliant line of code that was the last thing I needed to turn my Sidewinder X4 into an actual working steno machine... As long as you don't mind pressing enter after every stroke. Next I have to figure out how to make the program recognize the interval between when a key or group of keys is pressed and when they're all released so that it can delineate strokes automatically. For now, though, it's recognizing every chord I throw at it and translating them as cleanly as if it were coming from my Revolution Grand.



Anyone who wants to play around with it can download stenowinder.py and ploverbd.py (the dictionary file) at the github. Put them in the same directory. If you've got Python 3 installed, you should be able to just run the program without installing anything else. Let me know if that isn't the case. If your keyboard doesn't have anti-ghosting like the Sidewinder X4, you'll probably have to press each key individually rather than chording them, but at least you can get a taste of how it's supposed to work. I am ridiculously excited, but I'd better go do what I actually get paid for. More later!