It's a mapping between some keys pressed and some output. If you really need emojis, make that your output. I map A-R to "->" for C programming. You could map HR*APHD (for "lambda") to λ if you wanted. Honestly, the bigger restriction is whether the receiving application handles Unicode.
I'm only familiar with Plover steno theory. It's hard to imagine that theories would exist without a phonetic fallback (in the event that you don't know the stroke for a word). All of them will have fingerspelling.
For English, there's at least Plover, Phoenix, and StenEd. Other languages have theories, too.
All theories have "briefs" which are strokes assigned to something other than phonetics. Instead of writing A/TKEUGS/AL ("a", "dishn", "al") for "additional", you can stroke ALG. The STPH-P for up is another example of a non-phonetic brief. In that case, the "theory" is the shape of the key layout. Some people go crazy and just memorize a bunch of, essentially, random key-to-output mappings. I've heard that's pretty close to what Magnum is like. It's mostly brute memorization based on statistical frequencies of words and phrases and "easy to stroke" keys. That's how you get to 360 wpm.
thanks, that looks very complicated, but maybe it's still very fast, so hence my original question - has there been some research into those improvements? Maybe adding an extra key would make it much better? Maybe in some cases holding is better (like repeatable cursor movements), etc
If you mean at a hardware level, yes. But that's not unique to steno.
Mark Kingsbury, the world record holder, uses some touch sensitive board thing that isn't mechanical (if I recall correctly).
There are plenty of keyboard hobbiests who make chorded boards, some with more keys, some with less, some in line, others with curvature.
This gets a little in the direction of "what is steno"? Is it the STPHKWRAO*EUFPLTRBGS layout? Is it the common portions between theories? What differentiates "steno" from "chorded"?
What do you mean by "research into those improvements"?
A steno theory is a correspondence between key combinations and output. The theory is a (hopefully) cohesive system for remembering that mapping.
By academic research, I don't know of any. I don't know of any for 1:1 keyboard mappings either. I suppose you could say that "used by the entire profession of court reporters daily for a century" might constitue some kind of research. A steno theory can behave more like a language than a layout. It may evolve over time and has an associated culture. But it also operates at the individual level. No two steno users will have the same dictionary.
