I’ve seen a couple of you say you ditched the foot pedal, which made me rethink my setup. For someone breaking in this month, is a USB pedal still worth it, or are you fine with keyboard controls in Express Scribe/FTW and a text expander like PhraseExpress? Also, what did your recent pre-employment tests look like (minutes of audio, accents), so I can practice smarter?
Hotkeys are fine — I remap Caps Lock as a modifier with AutoHotkey (https://www.autohotkey.com/) so Caps+J/K/L handle rewind/play/fast-forward everywhere, and my ankle thanks me. My latest screening had two files (a short H&P and a longer consult), one non‑native speaker with light background noise; use an A–B loop on tricky phrases and seed a tiny ROS/meds template in PhraseExpress to “practice smarter.”.