Orthotyping

Some thinking about a type of keyboard layout I'll call "orthotyping" because idk what else to call it :p

One of my goals in making Pinchord, a chorded keyboard layout, was to minimize the hardware constraints as much as possible. Pinchord works on just about all commercially available steno hardware, or any NKRO board with at least 2 rows, 5 columns on the left hand, 6 columns on the right hand, and 2 keys per thumb.

Those are admittedly pretty strict requirements, but a good amount of boards actually fit into that, with the notable exception of... Probably every board that any normal person would have or you'd find anywhere that isn't specifically in the niche community that builds boards specifically like this...

Such is the cost of chording :/

I think there is obviously a lot of benefit to making text input systems that are compatible with any keyboard you'd find laying around. Fortunately, they mostly all have the same layout.

This, of course, takes chording completely out of the picture, leaving serial, or letter-by-letter, input.

My revolutionary idea is that we should do what we're already doing :p

But I think there's definitely a mix of steno, something like Pinchord, and normal alternate keyboard layouts.

The big problem with a serial system is information density.

The reason steno is so efficient is that it has extremely high, nearly infinite, information density. You can encode literally anything into a steno theory.

Re-arranging keys for efficiency is cool or whatever, but this is the real important thing when it comes to speed and ergonomics.

Idk how that's done I didn't really mean for this page to be released lol