Pinchord Rationale

Rationale for Pinchord:

The benefits of stenography are extremely apparent. The extreme speed and comfort are very desirable to programmers, writers, and other computer users.

However, steno was not designed with these users in mind, and greatly harms their learning and using experience because of it. Steno was designed and is extremely well optimized for court reporters and captioners, who require immense speeds in order to keep up with the rate of human speech.

Because of this, steno consistently prioritizes speed over the ease of learning and the effort required in order to maintain a system. These speeds aren't needed for hobbyists, and the user experience of steno could be improved by making different decisions that lower the speed ceiling.

The barrier to reaching practical speeds for hobbyist stenographers is grasping with the genuinely difficult concepts steno is built upon, rather than building up speed with their system.

Pinchord is optimized for the difficulty of learning and maintenance, while still keeping the chorded layout of steno, where most of the benefit of steno lies.

Steno's 2 row layout reduces finger movement to almost none, and chording characters together reduces the speed in which you need to write to maintain the same typing speed. This makes the layout more comfortable, while also allowing you to reach higher speeds.