plover VS emily-symbols

On this end, I am a big fan of the ProCAT writers, mostly because of the communications protocol they use, which allowed me to connect my writer to my laptop, start my CAT of Choice (then digitalCAT, now Plover), and start writing. No need to mess around tapping keys to make sure it's working; it was just ready to go.

please look at the setup instructions if you did not already do it. The Stentura 8000 and 8000LX are compatible with Plover. The instructions are the same as the 400SRT and can be found here. Please tell us if that worked!

You also have dedicated keyboards for a bit less than $250, which can be specifically used for stenography, and might work better if you want a regular keyboard for normal typing, and a stenography keyboard separately.

You can also try the Plover discord server, and go especially to the 'Italian' and 'theory development' tabs. I know I've seen people discussing the Michela machine on the theory development tab just recently, and there are other people working with the machine there who can help you. I think a lot of people are making their own keyboards as well. I have some other links for you to check out along those lines. The Michela machine channel, Michela Stenotype And The Universal Alphabet, and there are a few github and other such sites that will be useful here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Build Plover from source and apply a patch that enables the option of adding a delay between each emulated key event

Are you able to select text on its own with Plover (without the bolding command)? If not, I think your numlock might be enabled. Apparently that leads to issues on Windows (https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/issues/1531).

Plover recognizes that a USB cable is attached, but I have been able to detect my Stentura and I cannot get the red light to turn on regardless of what I do. Any help would be appreciated. I followed the instructions from : https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/How-to-setup-and-use-Plover-with-a-Stentura-400SRT

For a brief test, I downloaded the appimage from here, provided the executable bit and launched it successfully from the CLI

If you look at the code for the English Stenotype implementation, there are four specific keys defined in SUFFIX_KEYS, namely -G, -S, -D, and -Z. That means those are the only keys for which this will work, and only individual keys added as a suffix. That's why adding just -D works, but adding -DZ will not.

I'd like to try Emily's Symbols but don't know how to install it. Can anyone help me out?

There are no easy/standard steno chords for special symbols (e.g. !@#$%^&*). (I like to use [Emily's Symbol Dictionary]( https://github.com/EPLHREU/emily-symbols) for this.)

You can easily extend Emily Symbols to do whatever symbols you like. You can also use Emily Modifiers to take advantage of any keyboard shortcuts that exist in the editor you are using.

> Does it work for programming?

Yes, you can customize your dictionaries as much as you like and add common words/symbols that you use in programming, and there are decent options for writing in camelCase etc. There's also Emily's symbol dictionary which is good for writing various symbols [1], here's a poster showing all the symbols available in it [2].

> does it work for typing in different languages?

Yes. As long as there's an existing steno theory for the languages you want to use, then you can download those dictionaries and learn those theories. But if there isn't an existing theory/dictionary for a language then you can just use fingerspelling instead [3] (i.e., write letter by letter like on a regular keyboard), although that's ofc much slower than regular Steno is.

[1] https://github.com/EPLHREU/emily-symbols

[2] https://steno.sammdot.ca/emily-symbols.png

[3] https://steno.sammdot.ca/plover-fingerspelling.png

I'm using Plover to input text into my computer from the steno machine, and its translation engine supports several casing modes (including camelCase, snake_case and even kebab-case), so you can easily write variable names and what not. In addition, someone made a symbols dictionary that lets me type all sorts of punctuation and operators. Great for all kinds of computer use, not just code specifically.

Take a look at Emily's Symbols, they make writing various odd symbols a breeze. I'm only aware of Ted (developer of Plover) who uses steno for his coding work.