This follows Dosh, my per-character chording layout for the mesa keyboards. Dosh is eighteen keys, nine per hand, one letter per chord. That post ended with me having given up on steno. This one is about what happened two days later, when I found a kind of steno I hadn’t given up on.
This picks up directly from Taipo, which I wrote in early 2024. That post ended with a promise I hadn’t kept yet: that at some point I would have to decide Taipo was good enough to go cold turkey on QWERTY, and that I was revising my 30-key two-row keyboard toward exactly that. This is what happened when I finally did it. The short version is that it worked, that the layout I use is no longer quite Taipo, and that as of today it is genuinely my daily driver.
The story is easiest to follow as a sequence of shrinking key counts: 42 keys on the board I typed on for years, 30 when I removed QWERTY as an option, 20 when I rebuilt the board around where my hands actually want to be, 16 on a layout that turned out to be a step too far, and 18 on the one I’ve settled on.
That last layout is called Dosh. It is five days old. I named it on Thursday the 3rd, drilled it across a four-day weekend, and today is the first day it feels like it has caught up with where Taipo was — not in raw speed, but in the quality that actually matters to me, which is not having to think about it.