Can you use stenography instead of a regular keyboard?

Yes. The open-source program Plover turns a computer into a steno engine, and it runs on Windows, Linux and Mac ¹. Whether it works like a steno machine depends on your keyboard, and learning the skill is a long project. Court reporting's basic skills alone take two to four years ². A regular keyboard is a starting point, not a substitute for a stenotype.

Plover runs on an ordinary computer

Plover is a desktop application that lets anyone use stenography to write on a computer. The project says it reaches "speeds of 200WPM and beyond" ³. That is the project's own claim, not a measured result, so treat it as an upper bound rather than a typical speed.

The QMK firmware documentation says Plover with arpeggiation needs no changes to the keyboard and is supported on any other QWERTY keyboard ⁴. That makes it a low-cost way to try steno before you buy anything. The documentation does not give a speed for arpeggiation, so measure your own.

Chording needs N-key rollover, and many keyboards do not support it

Ordinary typing already uses overlapping key presses. The 136 million keystroke study found that slow typists used almost no rollover, while most fast typists used it on 40 to 70 percent of their keystrokes ⁵. Rollover typing is the ability to press a new key before you release the last one.

Chording is harder. Every key in a chord has to register at the same moment. Keyboards without isolation diodes can produce ghosting when as few as three keys are pressed together ⁶. The QMK documentation says that if a keyboard supports NKRO in hardware, and NKRO is enabled as a USB endpoint, you can chord with the keyboard itself ⁷. Check your keyboard's specification and its settings before you rely on that mode.

Court reporting takes years, and no published timeline covers everyday use

The best-documented timeline is for court reporting. It takes two to four years to learn the basic skills ², and the top certification leg is 225 words per minute at 95 percent accuracy ⁸.

We found no published timeline for using Plover to write everyday text on a keyboard, so the court figures are the only benchmark here. Expect your first weeks to be slower than your usual typing, because you are learning a new map of chords.

It depends on the keyboard, the goal and the time you have

If your keyboard has hardware NKRO, you can try true chording. If it does not, arpeggiation is the way to start. Either way, the quality of the result depends on your practice, not on the software alone.

What to do if you want to try it

1. Check your keyboard for NKRO. Read its specification and find out whether NKRO can be enabled. If it cannot, start with arpeggiation on any QWERTY keyboard.
2. Install Plover and follow its documentation. Practice the chord map a little each day rather than in long sessions.
3. Measure net speed and accuracy every week. Use the same passage each time, and count errors. Our guide to how typing speed is measured explains the counting rules.
4. Compare the other routes for drafting. Touch typing builds on the keyboard you already have. Speech is another route, and our speaking vs typing guide covers how it compares. Yap, which we make, is an on-device dictation app for Mac and Windows, and you can try speech in your browser on the free online dictation page.

Read next

• For the court benchmark and what it demands, read how fast do stenographers type.
• For the training timeline, read how long it takes to learn stenography.
• For pen systems, read how fast is shorthand writing.
• For the machine and its keys, see the stenotype entry.