Amazing Crayon Box Steno Machine!

Holy floog, this is so freaking cool! Check out this fantastic DIY steno machine by Escaped Echidna!! Detailed plans and specs here. As I said to her on the Discord when she posted it, it reminds me of the old Altoids tin mini-amp projects that I used to admire back in the day. Just ingenious.

Plover Theory Book Update

I haven't had a chance to write a proper review of the Stenokey yet, so just a short post for today: If you haven't looked at Ted's textbook recently, go check it out. It's still a work in progress, but he's been on fire lately, and has added several excellent new chapters. He's also thinking of trying to find another name for it, so if you have any suggestions that are catchier than "Plover Theory" (which I quite like, to be honest), drop him a line.

Belated Bugfix Link

Heyyy, this is way late, but if you didn't catch the bugfix weekly that was released over a week ago, check it out. It fixes both a problem in Gemini PR protocol that I've been struggling with and a bug in the newest big release that caused the suggestions window to crash, along with support for macros and metas, which you can read about in the release notes. I'll try to stay more on top of this stuff in the future, but better late than never, right? Right!

Coming soon: My review of the Stenokey, a beautiful piece of hardware that might eventually find its way to the Plover Store in kit form, if we can drum up enough interest in it. Its inventor sent me a prototype a few weeks ago, and I really love it. Stay tuned for a more thorough report!

Another <$50 NKRO Keyboard

Since the Sidewinder X4 was discontinued, I've been referring people to the Zalman for a low cost NKRO solution, but if you prefer a mechanical keyboard to a rubber dome keyboard and don't want to spend more than $50, you might want to consider the Plugable. It seems to be selling for around $42 and has Cherry MX switches; it'd probably be fun both as a starter steno machine and as something to hack around with. If you give it a try, let us know, either here or on the Discord!

Ty's Ergodox Tripod Rig

Hey, check out this great post from longtime community member Ty about the tripod rig he made for his new steno-dedicated Ergodox EZ!

Amorfati: A New Ergodox.

Call for More Free Multilingual Layouts and Dictionaries

So with the recent feature-loaded weekly release of Plover, we now have support for plugins, including the ability to add new steno keyboard layouts and protocols. This finally allows us to support non-English stenographic systems. Benoit implemented MIDI support, which opens the door for Italian steno using the Michela system. We've had other people stepping forward recently with dictionaries and layout plugins for Portuguese and Chinese. Now would be a great time for other multilingual stenographers to put their oar in. We've had a ton of interest in German steno, but apart from Stan Sakai's English layout German dictionary (which is mostly intended for captioning entry level German language classes), I don't believe any free German dictionaries have made their way to open steno. We've also had substantial interest in Korean, Norwegian, Russian, and Polish. I know many of these languages have machine steno theories that haven't yet been made computer-compatible, so they'd probably require a fair amount of work to get into working order, but consider this a challenge! I'm so glad and grateful that we can finally support an international steno community in the OSP, and can't wait to see what will happen next.

New Plover Weekly released with plugins!

The future of Plover is now released into the wild. With a plugins manager, we open up the ability to download extra features that before would never make it into the official Plover release. Lots of cool widgets and doo-dads to extend functionality, along with support for rare hardware, speedometers, and support for other languages, potentially. It’s like an App Store for Plover, just open the plugins manager to get new plugins today.

The release is a beta but you can still feel free to grab it. Check out the changelog below.

Plover v4.0.0.dev5+9.gba958374

Warning: Version 4 is a major change and the configuration file it creates is not compatible with Plover 3 or earlier. Please backup your plover.cfg

Changes

Plugins

Screenshot of the new plugins manager (background image source)

• with a new plugins manager, install, list, update, and remove plugins from within Plover!
• new supported plugins:
  • Dict Commands
    Enable, disable, and reorder your dictionaries using strokes.
  • Dictionary Builder
    Interactive wizard to build up your dictionaries from a text article or list of words.
  • Italian Stentura
    Use an Italian Stentura machine with Plover.
  • MIDI
    Use a MIDI piano or a dedicated MIDI machine like Michela with Plover. For keyboard makers: MIDI is a great protocol option with lots of keys and is easier to implement than some serial protocols.
  • Plugins Manager (installed by default)
    Find, install, update, and remove plugins for Plover.
  • Python Dictionary
    .py dictionaries are pure functions that map a set of chords to a translation. A better alternative to scripting the creation of dictionaries for anyone who knows Python.
  • Treal (installed by default)
    Use the Treal steno machine (the code was moved out of Plover and into a plugin).
  • VLC Commands
    Control VLC media player playback using strokes.
  • Windows Brightness
    Control monitor brightness on Windows.
  • WPM Meter
    Speedometer widgets that show your typing speed and strokes-per-second.
• support for custom machine configuration widgets

User Interface

• new icon for read-only dictionaries
• show a “reload” icon while dictionaries are being loaded
• outdated dictionaries are automatically reloaded on configuration change (e.g. when clicking the machine reconnect button)
• improve lookup: strip spaces from lookup, improve and fix display (correctly show translations containing HTML markup)
• improve suggestions: only suggest on new/modified text, rework word splitting (e.g. if “full-release” is entered, suggestions for “release” will be shown too)
• improve keymap configuration widget to be easier to use
• add support for creating new dictionaries

Main Dictionary

• cleanup main dictionary: remove legacy Eclipse TPHR-BG entries, remove redundant entries
• dictionary has some additions and changes thanks to community feedback from issue 400, significant changes are outlined here.

Linux

• the AppImage can now be installed/uninstalled
• drop the need for wmctrl

Mac

• don’t suppress keyup events created by Plover, which improves compatibility with some applications when using a Keyboard as a steno machine.

Other

• keyboard: fix a number of edge cases / bugs
• rework keymap configuration widget
• formatting rework: consistent output with both space placement settings, better handling retro-case commands

Development

• drop Python 2 support
• update Python version to 3.6
• update PyQt5 version to latest LTS: 5.9
• export utils as plover_build_utils so it’s available for plugins development

Installation Guide

​

Consolidated Page of GitHub Plover Repos

This might not be news to some people, but I was surprised and delighted to learn that Plover appears as a topic on GitHub, allowing various Plover-related repos from many different authors to appear on a single page: https://github.com/topics/plover

This seems like it would be helpful for both potential users and potential contributors to these projects, and it's also cool to be able to get sort of a snapshot of the Plover ecosystem as it currently stands. Thanks to lead dev Ted for pointing it out on the Discord yesterday.

Plover + MIDI + Braille

Check out this mindbending video from Sillabix, a user of Michela steno, who recently got our devs to create a version of Plover that works with Michela input from a MIDI piano keyboard. Michela was originally developed to work with Italian, which has fewer orthographic oddities than English, requiring fewer keys, but it has been adapted to English as well, which is what's being shown here. It's somewhat slower than traditional English steno, but seriously cool. For added awesomeness, Sillabix integrated it with both a text-to-speech synthesizer and a Braille font, which presumably could be integrated into a refreshable Braille display for realtime tactile output. Pretty dang rad.

PloverCAT

It's still early days, but Luke has been working on a plugin for Plover that replicates traditional CAT software by offering a text field where every translation is automatically mapped to a stroke in the log, allowing for globaling and retranslation by altering stroke definitions throughout the document. It's been years since I've used CAT software (I just use Vim, Aloft, or Streamtext for pretty much all my captioning), but I know several people who have requested a feature like this, and it's pretty cool to see that it's being developed! Luke has promised to keep us posted as the plugin comes together, so stay tuned!

Remember Outlines in Plover more Easily!

Check out this awesome post on the Plover subreddit about longtime community member BX1959's new Anki deck and mnemonic drilling system for memorizing the Plover outlines for the top 4,300 words in English! From the post:

ROPE is a guide to learning and recalling Plover outlines for over 4,300 common English words. It does this in two ways: first, it relies on Anki's spaced repetition system to help you solidify the outlines in your memory. Second, it includes mnemonic devices (in the form of stories) for a sizeable chunk of the outlines, about 1200. These stories serve to connect the outlines to their corresponding word by including words that are similar to the components of the outlines.

If you'd like to try using ROPE to learn new outlines, download both the Excel document and the Anki file. (If you don't have Anki on your computer, download it for free from the website.) The Anki file and the Excel document have the same material; Anki is just a flashcard program that lets you keep track of your learning, and the Excel file is useful to have as a reference. Once you've gone through the Learn Plover! exercises, you can start using Anki to learn new outlines, even if you're very new to Plover. This system is meant to be super-customizable, so you can add in or change stories, outlines, and words however you please. For more detailed information, see below!

I haven't used Anki myself, but I know tons of people who swear by it. Give it a try and let us know what you think, either in the comments to this post or in the Discord!

Want a Hacktoberfest T-shirt? Contribute to an OSP repo!

Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source, and anyone who makes four or more pull requests to an open source repo hosted on Github will receive a free T-shirt from Digital Ocean.

Some Open Steno Project repos to contribute to:

Plover
Stenodict
Stenojig
Stenomancer
Stenocomplete

If you have your own steno-related open source projects hosted on Github, feel free to add them to this post in the comments.

Happy hacking!

New Live Coding Demo from Ted

Check out this rad live coding demo from our intrepid lead dev Ted! So hypnotizing.

Community Input on Spending OSP Funds

Last night the Open Steno Project received an extremely generous donation of $500 from a longtime community member who wishes to remain anonymous. This brings our total funds (Donations + Store Sales to over $2,500. Not too shabby! We've got some of that earmarked for future projects -- domain names, a software cert, etc -- but there will probably be some left over. Community feedback on how best to spend the funds would be helpful. What do you think? A bulk buy of ultralight key switches or other hardware to sell in the store? Seed money for another crowdfunded steno game campaign? Or should we sit on it for a while longer until the right opportunity comes along? All ideas welcome.

A thousand thanks again to our magnanimous benefactor!! This community is amazing.

The Volksboard

Check out this incredible DIY steno machine with step-by-step instructions on how to build it, by the amazing Carl. It's called the Volksboard, and I love it. Scrabble tiles for steno keys! Ingenious! It's also wireless and uses WiFi with a Raspberry Pi Zero built into the board to connect to Plover.

Toss Ted Some Cash For More Red Hot Steno Theory

Ted, our amazing lead dev, has been developing Plover for FREE over the last several years -- not to mention the hundreds and hundreds of hours of unpaid web design, tech support, hardware hacking, community leadership, and all-around steno ambassadorship that he's contributed to the cause. He's got a day job and a personal life, so he recently decided that his eagerly awaited new steno theory book would need to be prioritized on a gratuity system. Toss him some cash to get more pages! I just threw some in. Lord knows he deserves it!

Responses to the 2017 OSP Community Survey!

It took me a while to get to these, but I finally made a digest of selected responses from the 2017 Open Steno Project Community Survey. Here are the complete responses, if you're interested in all the details. I figured I'd just touch on a few highlights.


First off, we got a total of 91 responses, quite a bit higher than last year's 72!

We can also see signs of the Plover community maturing, with almost 40% of respondents in the 60 to 260 WPM range, compared to last year's 30%.

Most respondents are still working on exceeding their regular typing speed, which isn't too surprising, considering that many of our new recruits this year came from ultrafast speed typing circles.

But of those who have exceeded their regular typing speed, 75% did it in under a year.

Most of our users are not interested in formal stenography programs.

Which isn't too surprising, since most of them want to use steno to write prose or code.

We've got a strong cross-platform community, with 55 out of 88 respondents using Plover on operating systems other than Windows. No other steno software runs natively on non-Windows operating systems, so we've pretty much got that end of the market sewn up, haha!

Finally, a small selection of comments from respondents:

"Documentation is getting better all the time! Good work! Discord has been the best thing to happen to Plover lately."

"I'm not fast yet but am usually able to guess new words, and steno intrudes into my mind sometimes and there I am mentally stenoing stuff. Weird but fun."

"Finding it too hard as a self teach option."

"Plover allows me to use my writer with my Mac without having to use Windows! What's not to love?!?"

"Would love to see absolute beginner training exercises in Steno Arcade."

"Learn Plover is very good, but I'd like to see the theory spelled out more explicitly; there's a lot that's not covered, and you have to learn inductively, more or less."

"Plover got my career off the ground. Thanks."

I definitely agree that we need more entry-level training and drilling tools. Ted's new textbook should help, as will Stenomancer. But clearly learning steno theory and building speed is possible with the currently available tools, which thrills me to bits. Let's keep it up! I hope next year's survey response count will be even bigger!

The Gherkin!

I got a Gherkin! Isn't it adorable? The delightful Kyzak on the Plover Discord built it for me, and I love it. Sadly, the key mapping was messed up, so I'll have to send it back before I can use it, but the size and shape are extremely endearing, and the touch seems quite nice as well. If you want one but don't have the skills to build and solder it yourself, you might still be able to nab one if you head over to the Discord. Especially great if you have small hands and value portability.

One User's Review of the StenoMod

Check out this great review of my favorite open source steno machine, the StenoMod!

I Now Own an NKRO Laptop!

My old Lenovo Helix is getting alarmingly long in the tooth, so I bought an Alienware 13 for about $1,000 on Amazon two days ago. It arrived last night, and this morning I tried it with Plover for the first time. Sure enough, its keyboard has proven to be fully NKRO! Woohoo! Obviously it requires quite a bit more force than my Infinity or even my StenoMod (which is about the size and weight of the Alienware's ridiculously massive power brick!) but the keys are nicely flat, and I find that I don't actually notice the staggering all that much. I used it to converse a bit with friends on the Plover Discord during my break and found it surprisingly comfortable! It'll be a real asset when transcribing on the subway, at the very least, and while it'll never replace a professional machine, it'll let me use Plover more often for casual computer use, which is excellent. All in all, I'm quite pleased that truly NKRO laptops are actually a thing now, even if they tend to be a little on the pricey side. These are all just first impressions, but so far I must say I recommend it!

Playing Catchup

I haven't been good at keeping up with the amazing things that have been happening in the open steno world! So here's a quick rundown!

• Excitingly, the For All To Play team has released a new version of Steno Arcade on Steam! It includes new songs, new animated audience members, and a first pass at screen reader support! There's still a bit more to go before they deliver everything promised in the crowdfunding campaign, but this is a significant advance from the previous version.
  
• The Hackathon resulted in a basic sketch for what I think could be a fantastic beginner-level steno tutorial game. It's a sort of combination top-down RPG, adventure game, and quickfire typing game. We're calling it Stenomancer, and you can read all about it on our lead developer Yianna's GitHub page. We've also got a channel for it on the Plover Discord, so feel free to drop by there if you want to help brainstorm ideas for it.
  
• Speaking of resources for beginners, our multitalented lead dev Ted has been working on a new entry level steno theory book. It's still in progress, but I love what he's got so far.
  
• Gaming laptops are finally, finally coming out with enough rollover to use steno. The ROG Zephyrus GX501 from Asus costs a pretty penny, but if you want portable steno without wrangling an external keyboard, it's probably your best bet.
  
• And one more bit of steno gaming news: The popular competitive typing site Typeracer has opened up its monthly championship to people using steno! We get a separate leaderboard and everything. Two months ago I narrowly squeaked by dark horse self-taught steno whiz John, and last month he beat me, 98.91% to 97.88%! Gonna do my damnedest to reclaim the title this month if I can, but John is a force of nature, so there are no guarantees. If you want to join, make sure you include "plover" or "steno" in your user and/or display name, and install a Tampermonkey script to get around Typeracer's frustrating steno-unfriendly input length limit (which they've promised to fix in future updates).

Steno Learnathon at Flatiron School NYC, June 25

The Flatiron School is hosting a Learnathon/Hackathon on June 25, and one of the hacking challenges will be to make a simple, addictive tutorial game for steno beginners. I'll be giving a 45-minute crash course in how steno works and then letting people loose to devise games that teach the steno keyboard layout, simple common words that can be written with one to three keys, and possibly simple chords as well. All participants in the Learnathon/Hackathon will be entered in a raffle where they'll have the chance to win a Planck and/or Steno Hero/Steno Arcade T-shirts. There are still tickets available, so if you're gonna be in NYC that Sunday, come by and give it a try!

OpenSteno.org Makeover!

OpenSteno.org has received a major makeover, with updated content and styling by the ever-versatile Ted. The old wiki has been replaced with a new one that's far better organized and contains current information about the state of the project, including the Beginner's Guide and a rundown of affordable steno machines. We've needed a major content overhaul for ages now, so I'm really grateful that Ted put in the hard work to make it happen.

New Plover Weekly: Plover 4.0!

I have a substantial backlog of cool Open Steno stuff to share with you, but all of that's been superseded by an incredibly exciting development: There's a new version of Plover available to download! I'm just gonna link you to the Github page detailing the new weekly Plover 4.0 release!! As with all weeklies, this is an experimental release, so proceed with caution, but if you have the time to play around and tinker with it, please be sure to give our mindblowingly amazing developers Ted and Benoit your feedback so that they can incorporate it into the next stable release. The quick rundown of features, from the release page:

• New UI (PyQT instead of wx)
• Plover closes to tray, so you don't need to have a window in your taskbar.
• Dictionary Revamp
• Enable / disable dictionaries
• Dictionary display order is now higher priority first (configurable)
• External dictionary changes trigger a reload on configuration change (e.g. reconnecting the machine)
• Windows now has an installer version available.
• Older Mac versions should be supported again. (The lower bound is untested)
• We now create a Linux AppImage.
• Plugin support (not yet documented).
• Will allow for custom machines, layouts, utilities, commands, and more, in time.

Go check out the new release at the Github page! Woohooo!

The Adorable Gherkin Keyboard

Someone in the Plover Discord Group posted a picture of a tiny ortholinear keyboard that I now want desperately, even though I already own an Infinity Ergonomic, StenoMod, SOFT/HRUF, Planck, and Sidewinder, not to mention a manual steno machine that ostensibly was once owned by Margaret Mead's stenographer. Look at this thing!

It's called a Gherkin, and it's an extremely stripped down 30-key qwerty keyboard that could actually work pretty well as an ultra-portable steno machine. There aren't enough rows for a number bar, but Charley of StenoMod fame pointed out that you could map the keys to either side of the vowels to the number bar and get numbers that way. People with large hands might struggle with the crammed-in key placement, but people with small fingers like me would probably love it. It supports NKRO firmware and mechanical keyswitches, so there shouldn't be any problem using it with Plover.

Like most mechanical keyboards aimed at hobbyists, this one requires assembly, including soldering, and requires you to flash the firmware manually to the board, both of which are a step or two outside my own personal wheelhouse. Plus you have to get someone to make you the PCBs. But if you're looking for a fun DIY project, this could be a really fun convertible steno/qwerty machine that almost fits in your pocket. If you wind up making one, let us know what you think. And if you wind up making two... Uh... Can I buy one off of you? Seriously, that thing is cute as heck.

Take the 4th Annual Community Survey!

Yep, it's that time of year again! And given how much our community has grown in the past year, I'm really excited to see what happens. Really hoping we'll be able to beat our former record of 72 responses! (We collected a few more after I posted last year's results.) It'll only take a minute, and it'll help us tremendously!

Please take the Open Steno Project Community Survey 4.0!

Stenotoppers: 3D Printed Keys for Your Mechanical Keyboard!

The most exciting recent news in the Open Steno sphere is Jason's new Stenotoppers models, which you can print on any 3D printer (or have printed for you by a 3D printing shop, though that can get pricey), to turn your staggered-layout mechanical keyboard with steno-unfriendly beveled keytoppers into an ortholinear steno-style layout with smooth interfaces between rows.



It works with any Cherry or Gateron switches (I recommend clears/whites if you're in the market, since they have the lowest actuation force) and is entirely free to download and modify. If you have a mechanical keyboard and a 3D printer or access to one via your local makerspace, this is a great robust alternative to our laser-cut acrylic keytoppers, which are sometimes a little fiddly to align. Please note that these are unfortunately not compatible with the Zalman NKRO keyboard, which at $45 is the cheapest solution for entry level steno. Most mechanical keyboards with compatible switches are in the $100 to $150 range, so budget accordingly.

Speaking of which, if you'd rather just buy an ortholinear keyboard at the outset, the Planck is currently available on Massdrop for another 5 days. I have one, built and donated to me by the fantastic Scott of SOFT/HRUF fame, and it's quite a nice little machine. A little clickier than my beloved StenoMod, and somewhat bulkier than the sleek and compact SOFT/HRUF, but a very strong contender in the dual qwerty/steno keyboard bracket. Even better, the firmware comes with a Plover layer built right in. You'll have to assemble it yourself, but I've been told it's not terribly difficult, even for beginners.

The Plover README file has been updated to include recent developments in the Open Steno community.

Finally, there's a new expanded StenoJig landing page that allows you to customize your drills in a more flexible way without editing the URLs as you had to do previously. Extremely convenient!

Plover 3.1.1 Released

This is a minor bug fix release affecting Linux and Mac users.

• Fix a certain type of NKRO on Linux (#644)
• Fix control key on macOS Sierra not working with global shortcuts
• Fix an edge case of output for Mac, where certain keys wouldn't be shifted

Check out the release on GitHub.

Plover Beginner's Guide

This is a bit overdue, but we now have an excellent Beginner's Guide to Getting Started With Plover over on the new wiki, which has supplanted the old outdated stenoknight.com wiki. It's got step-by-step instructions on setting Plover up and trying it out for the first time, as well as hardware advice and links to learning and practice resources. Many thanks to Ted and Ellis for the writing and editing work!

Come To The Discord Group! Meet Stenobot!

So I've pretty much dissolved the Aviary. I just couldn't keep the spammers out, and I froze the board to new posts, and it had very low traffic anyway. All the real Plover community action these days is on the Discord group, which is basically like updated IRC, or a more open Slack. It's great, and we've got a fantastic group of people, with wide-ranging conversations on steno and virtually everything else under the sun. Also, as of this week, we have a new member:



Ted whipped us up a bot called StenoBot, who displays all steno code written between backticks on the Learners channel (and on other channels if you start the line with !). It's very cool.

Come check it out at the Discord Group!

New Gutenberg Sentence Drills at Steno Jig!

Check out all the new sentence drills featuring only common English words, extracted from public domain texts! There are a total of 80 of them so far. The URL above links to number 80; just change that number in the address bar to get each of the rest of them.

Timeline of the OSP and New Steno Jig Exercises

First off, Ted has compiled a rough timeline of the Open Steno Project from its inception through the present day. Useful for people who want to put the whole trajectory of Open Steno in context.

Also, Steno Jig (a link to which you can find on the learning resources page on the new Github-based Plover wiki, which has superseded the old outdated Wiki), has a new fork by Jason which uses sentences from Project Gutenberg containing the most used words in the English language. Great if you're looking for realistic practice material without too many esoteric words to wade through!