I have been using plover for about three years now for the majority of my time spent on the computer. I don't think I type more than 50 words a month using a regular keyboard. I still use (half) a keyboard for games, and there are some programs on Windows plover does not work with. There is an embedded steno engine (javelin-steno) so you don't have to use plover, but I have not set it up yet and just stick to using plover.
Its worth noting you can type single letters, so if you don't know a word or don't care to learn it, you can still type the word out. You don't have to memorize every single word.
Free Bard has been really useful for me for conversational type web searches. I don't really use Bing much anymore, but it was fun at first. Bard consistently gives me answers I am looking for, but I also try to only really ask it normie shit in a normie way.
Its okay if you have not used a high res screen recently. Its like using a shitty college classroom projector to program. I have a cheap 4k monitor so it kind of ruined vr for me for the moment. I will not get an 8k monitor until I have the screen in a headset first.
This is pretty close to how steno [https://www.openstenoproject.org/] works in practice and worth learning IMO if you are going to go this far. In fact I have a few emacs-specific chords, but not as many as you might think. The whole experience is a bit like if emacs is now your keyboard, so it happens to go great with emacs.
all the commercials still show the food arriving at your door in the us at least. if it does not come to my door like my packages, I am just not going to pay for the service. the companies will figure it out.
I always see wpm come up for steno stuff and while it can be faster, that's more of a professional thing. There are three cool things about plover for me. One you get to type pressing more than one or two keys at a time. Two the inputs are sent on key up or release, so can take your time pressing all the letters down, and then release them. Three, you have almost no hand movement at all, so its really, really, really comfortable to type on.
once you get that, you have the steno theories to expand all the words. plover comes with a stened dictionary, but thats just for the words. you can also do phrases, symbols, emoji, macros, and more. once you start adding dictionaries, using a computer becomes a lot more fun. plover is like really crazy layers.
for these, where it says starter, you just press all those keys down, and then on the other side you press the keys listed for what you want. so for example, I can enter like ~104 symbols without moving my hands. the average sybmol layer has like 20. the crossplatform movement dict lets me move around much easier in any text field. (note that you don't really even need to know what the key names you are pressing are as its all a pattern) I currently have six other dictionaries that I use some of the time. you can see more here: https://www.openstenoproject.org/stenodict/.
plover has made using a computer much more fun. its a bit of a hard sell for a lot of people, but I recommend trying out some of the other dictionaries to see what you can do besides type words fast. its seriously really crazy that we are only pressing one key at a time using a keyboard.
I write all my code using plover, but I am not a professional programmer. I use emacs most of the time. I use this dictionary for my symbols https://sammdot.ca/steno/emily-symbols.png, this one for typing almost any shortcut combination with my left-hand https://github.com/Abkwreu/plover-left-hand-modifiers/blob/m..., as well as this http://www.openstenoproject.org/stenodict/dictionaries/cross... for moving the cursor around and selecting text. The emily-symbol dictionary is fairly popular, and most users will have some set of dictionaries for shortcuts and movement.
Its worth noting you can type single letters, so if you don't know a word or don't care to learn it, you can still type the word out. You don't have to memorize every single word.