After switching to Dvorak, within months, I naturally began touch-typing. I suspect it is due to it being home-row-heavy, with all vowels on the left and most common consonants on the right.
I'm going to be adding additional keyboard layouts to https://www.typequicker.com/practice soon for the keyboard visualization. This might help people who are starting to learn it.
Dvorak seems to be mentioned frequently on this thread alone - I was surprised how many folks use this layout.
Yeah, I agree. I've noticed that some folks who reach 160wpm+ start to move off from the standard, "best practice" touch typing technique. With the hand guide visualization on https://www.typequicker.com I focused on just following the common "best practice" approach.
I should add a comment somewhere on the site that these are just the general recommended finger placements and not gospel.
Certain keys are just more comfortable with variation. I use an orth keyboard split keybaord as well so for me especially the Z key makes sense to type with pinky. On a standard qwerty keyboard, I've seen folks do both pinky and ring finger.
I don't think either the correct way - whatever variation of standard touch typing feels better and helps you type faster is the solution
Now that I think of it, they were also really helpful for learning how to scan a wall of console text and look for the useful bits, and also realizing the value of configuring shortcuts and syntax highlighting. I see someone already had the idea of using a text adventure to learn Bash: https://gitlab.com/slackermedia/bashcrawl
I believe my touch typing speed come about with instant messaging applications such as AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, or chatting in mIRC. I felt the need to type as fast as possible to be able to stay in the conversation with many users or to keep conversation moving as naturally as speaking speed.
They don't!
My high school nor elementary school didn't have it - even though we literally had a computer class. It was never even mentioned.
Most universities don't have it. It's mind blowing - it's such a common activity across every desk job and yet no one is teaching it.
I find keeping my fingers on the home row quite unnatural and prevents me from typing chords with Ctrl/Alt and Shift. How have folks overcome this?
I wouldn't be too hung up on how it is taught. Once you learn the essentials and can type a sentence or so without looking, then you'll be fine. Personally, I just watch the screen and correct and make slight hand position adjustments without looking down at the keyboard. The fun trick is when somebody walks up to my desk to ask a question, and I continue typing whilst engaging in their conversation. It is sort of a file-write-flush for me, to capture whatever was on my mind when I was interrupted.
ctrl and shift heavy flows are a remnant from ibmpc / windows era and suck for ergonomics, unfortunately. Most people realise just how much more comfortable cmd+ is from using a mac. You're holding the thumb there anyway, might as well make use of it.
I can type around 60-70 wpm with non touch typing. Same as you, often have to correct things with Backspace.
I rarely use my pinky. But with touch typing I have to use it more and it feels very unnatural.
When I have to bang out emails or any other form of text for work, I can't see myself slowing down to force sticking on the home row to learn touch typing.
I can practice in the evening. But then you essentially keep using the 'bad' way of typing while also learning the good way. Seems confusing.
Honest question, maybe a blind spot of mine. Touch typing is so integrated into my daily experience it feels like driving or riding a bike. I mostly learned to touch type in the 90s just chatting with friends on AOL instant messenger. I think of touch typing as something nearly everyone picks up just as a side effect of living with computers.
Even in previous generations, most self-taught people get fast at hunt&peck rather than learning proper touch-typing. It is not a natural skill in any way, you need a conscious effort to stop looking and to limit your main fingers wandering.
I generally tried to keep my kids away from excessive screen usage, but I motivated them to touch-type anyway, because I always wished I'd learned it earlier than I did (in my early 30s). I see them reaping benefits already in their teenage years, knocking out school assignments very quickly and being able to focus on the content more than the typing.
I can't imagine not being able to touch-type. It's such second-nature that I can hold a conversation with someone while typing out separate thoughts I'm having about the conversation on a keyboard.
I work in a huge variety of fields and interact with people from all places in US society. My guess would be maybe 25-35% of people I've worked with use touch typing. Everyone chicken pecks.
Most people use phones nowadays and rarely use a physical keyboard. It just isn't that important to most people. They can get by without it.
I've seen interns looking for symbols on their keyboard for a second or two (the tilde "~" or the pipe symbols "|") when I asked them to type in a certain shell command.
Since I started building this website, many of my friends and family learned touch typing because of the site never even heard of proper touch typing technique until I started talking about what I was working on.
I think it's due to poor education - there's no institutionalized course that teaches this. A couple schools maybe, but nothing on a big scale.
Kind of mind boggling given that almost every desk job uses a keyboard
From this anecdote, I hope to show that it is possible to learn to type well with general keyboard use. Note that this is the very skill where it's useful. So, I posit: touch typing doesn't need to be taught because the people who use a keyboard enough to benefit from it will learn something better automatically.
This is a pretty poor argument that can be applied to practically any skill. "Why should we teach people in a structured way? They can just learn it by doing it!"
For many people, having a structure to learn from is extremely helpful, even if they do diverge from it to learn in their own way.
Also I don't think we should focus solely on "people who will benefit from it" - presumably you're talking about people whose livelihoods depend directly on typing efficiently. What about those who only use it casually but still want to communicate effectively?
Did you intentionally order custom keycaps and replace it on your keyboard?
One solution I'm trying out to help users is on https://www.typequicker.com/practice I added a keyboard + hand visualization guide - to help so that folks get used to not looking down on their keyboard.
Literally my experience summarized perfectly in two sentences!
> I used monkeytype.com for the most part.
I used it for a bit too but found typing random words kind of boring - I wanted more pre-existing variety without having to always add custom texts which is why I built https://www.typequicker.com/practice and added the topics mode.
MonkeyType is a really great site though - the community they've built is incredible
> Combined with getting good at the Vim keybindings which I did around the same time, it makes programming feel like a video game.
Omg, exactly this lol. When I was at my last job, some of the most boring tasks were fun because I was gamifiying with vim - without being able to type fast, I would have been miserable doing these types of tickets
I didn't do anything explicitly - it was more like mental game. e.g.: "How can I do this X task with macros?" or "I'm going to try to use a macro across a quicklist of locations", etc
This is what I meant
1. Too many keys on the right pinky - all punctuation except for `!`, `,`, `.`, plus backspace and return.
2. Opposite modifier keys rule - I just can't retrain myself for this one especially since it's a yet another key for the right pinky. I always end up only using the keys on the left side.
Not sure how to best fix those.
fwiw I use a moonlander but many keyboards could work equally well I'm sure
The second time, 5 years into my career, I did it for health reasons, and my hands hurt much less as a result. This time though I didn’t get any keyboard covers, didn’t have a relabelled keyboard, and didn’t learn the key mapping. I used an onscreen reference only, and phased it out after a few days. I switched cold-turkey on day one of a Christmas break, made sure to do some practice each day, and 2.5 weeks later when I went back to work I was touch typing Dvorak, albeit slowly.
Nowadays I type fast and get nothing out of looking at the keyboard. I normally use blank or QWERTY labels. And it’s great.
I don’t think I could have taught myself touch typing on QWERTY because I was already too ingrained with bad habits, but switching layout was a great opportunity to start from scratch and get it right.
It is possible to learn touch typing on a layout where you have already developed bad practices. That's what I did on Qwerty. There will initially be a tendency to switch back to the hunt-and-peck method, since you're not yet fully comfortable with touch typing. This can be curtailed by forcing yourself from looking at the keyboard. It's nearly impossible to hunt-and-peck without looking at the keyboard occasionally. However, that tendency will eventually disappear as you become comfortable with touch typing, as it's the easier style among the two.
I also agree with your point about touch typing QWERTY. I'd even bet that learning to touch type any non-QWERTY keyboard layout, even if it's less efficient than QWERTY, is beneficial purely because it erases bad habits ingrained over time from undisciplined typing. Blank keycaps are the a true meta.
Now it's second nature and I can't imagine how I did it before. I'm not too concerned about speed since I was plenty fast previously. I think I'm maybe 10% faster. But the difference in comfort is night and day.
Switching to a split keyboard also is what got me touch typing, but only on the split keyboard. The moment I revert back to a regular keyboard, I go back to my old typing habit, and even practicing to touch type on a regular keyboard quickly feels uncomfortable.
Only to find that I’m mostly using other people’s computers when they call me over to help, and suddenly I’m mashing my meaty paws all over their MacBook as they look on in horror that this supposed technical professional can’t even press the shift key reliably.
This was my next big step in my typing journey.
Started with a crkbd/corne and now ended up with QMK modded Kinesis Advantage 2. I don't type as fast on the Kinesis due to deep keywells and just an insane amount of modded keys, but my hands thank me every day.
One other reason that led me down the path of correct typing and ergo keyboards was hand pain
I get the arguments in the abstract sense, you want the tool to be background, maximum focus spent in flow. But in my experience I’m rarely chugging out multiple WPM constant typing. This is as a software engineer coding on Python predominantly. Plus the advent of CoPilots along with autocomplete IDEs I am not even typing as much as before. Granted, I am spending less time looking at the keyboard because I have the key sequences imprinted in my head now, and that feels nice.
The blocker in flow is rarely the time I spend pecking out keys. So what am I missing, how much is it truly worth it?
My handwriting became neater, but much slower. I never recovered the speed, so this bit me in university. I used to joke that I never finish exams, so I make sure that everything I write is correct. I'd always do better than people who finished the whole exam.
I was introduced to computers late in life, at 16 in the early 2000s. When I got to university, typing was a struggle. One day I saw someone typing fast. I decided to learn.
I think for me, the biggest benefit is mostly when writing long messages, more than typing. Having most conversations async at work means fewer pauses between reading and replying.
It also sometimes looks silly watching someone play hide and seek with their keyboard, because I've met people who punch in a few jets, then go hunting for others as if they've moved position.
1) I photoshopped a photo of my not-dvorak keyboard moving the keys to their dvorak-fr positions
2) I fixed that photo on top of my screen. The physical layout was Azerty (not dvorak) and looking at it was useless. I searched the keys looking at the photo above my screen, not looking at the keyboard.
3) I grew more and more confident, and in a few months I was touch-typing in dvorak-fr - I've since discovered Bépo layout and wish I knew it too.
I'm learning a bit more about various layouts that people use - I'm considering adding a feature to my https://www.typequicker.com/practice where folks can build any layout (and have the hand+keyboard visualization of that layout they built).
Do you think this would be appealing to folks who try alternative layouts? It would involve a bit of work from my end so I want to prioritize accordingly on my TODOs
Once someone can type above ~120wpm the keyboard disappears from your brain.
For folks who want to learn typing, I recommend Jashe's Typing Guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L-P68VDSGlpLM5A9tfRvWFoh...
Thanks for sharing - seems like a very detailed guide and something down my alley :)
Thanks a lot for checking out the site - OP and creator here.
> That makes it easier to follow and learn
Yeah, that was my goal. It's pretty much what I used to learn as well.
I started this site ages and slowly added more and more features. I wanted to improve my coding skills while improving typing.
Primagaen always said to build what you want and use, so that's what I did haha
I will be adding many more features - I have a massive list! Thanks for the support. Any feedback is welcome: issues@typequicker.com
OP and site creator here.
Yeah I agree, monkeytype and typeracer are awesome! Huge fan and user of both.
I've just released this TypeQuicker app and I'm figuring out the best ways to monetize. I'm really hoping never run ads (I'm huge into anti-ad websites. I pay for things like Kagi for example, even though Google Search is free to use) which is why I'm settling for the freemium model (with some paid features).
For the record, everything the other sites you mentioned, I offer for free by the way :)
The paid features on https://www.typequicker.com/pricing are for AI powered, personalized learning. SmartPractice which analyses typing history and creates personalized, natural text focusing on user weakpoints, target practice to generate natural text based on certain sequences, etc.
Check out the video demo at the pricing page I added - I don't think any site offers this for free and that's all I'm charging for (I need to pay for the LLM API).
Let me know your thoughts! I'm really passionate about typing, keyboards, etc. I want to build the best typing platform and I want it to be valuable.
It's worth a try if you're having trouble with pain, worked for me. And it isn't just good for health reasons, it's just better suited to human use. It feels more natural and comfortable.
Amen.
Had terrible pain in wrists. Switching keyboards, learning touch typing, learning to use just enough force when typing, etc helped with wrist pain so much
I am at about 70 wpm and I do semi-touch typing. I can type without looking at the keyboard 95% of the time (symbols etc. are tricky), but I don't use all 10 fingers (pinkies are pretty much unused) and do not rely on having my hands in the 'home' position.
Doing the 10 finger based home position approach almost immediately feels incredibly restricting. Some things like typing a C with my middle finger feel like I am doing something counter to my anatomy (when would you ever make such a movement naturally? let alone hundreds or thousand times a day?).
I wonder whether it is just a lack of getting used to it or whether people who do the full on touch typing a lot just fuck up their body regularly.
> I wonder whether it is just a lack of getting used to it or whether people who do the full on touch typing a lot just fuck up their body regularly.
For me it was a matter of getting used it and building up that finger dexterity. Mind you, I now use an ortho, split keyboard (Kinesis adanvatage 2 ) and touch typing on it, hitting "c" feels natural for me.
I can see how on other keyboards it may not be the case.
Touch typing "best practice" is after all just a general guideline. These things vary so much because everyone has different keyboards, different sized hands (different finger length).
My suggestion is to focus on not tensing up and using just enough force to trigger the key when typing. Starting from touch typing and then adjusting the technique to your own preferences over time.
I've seen typist who do 200wpm+ by a technique that they came up on their own based on touch typing.
First of all, I'm really sorry. Persistent rsi/hand pain was brutal and terrifying for me. I went through a heavy phase where I even considered having to quit my dream job at the time at a financial tech start-up.
I had a mentor (software dev) at this company who shared his story - and he had rsi and it flared up so bad at one point he said he took ~6months sabbatical to recover.
Treat it seriously and look for ways to improve if it's bothersome and gets worse.
Things that helped me:
- rest, breaks, stretching, drink water, frequently - less gaming (I played a lot of league of legends) - learning to type with correct force (often overlooked topic). Practice typing slowly and gently so that you're pressing keys just hard enough to trigger the switch. Mindful, typing practice. Don't focus on speed or accuracy - just the force - switching keyboards; I went through a huge phase of various keybaord (corne/crknbd, various other mechanical keyboards, different layouts) and finally settled on a QMK-modded Kinesis Advantage 2. It's expensive but worth it. My mentor that I mentioned had it too and he recommend it a lot. - breathing; something I'm still working on. I learned that as most people type, they don't breathe and tense up. This has negative effects on your muscles/tissues and leads to unnecessary strain. - posture (split, ergo, ortho keyboards help with posture naturally).
Good luck - wrist pain is scary but it's really improved for me. I typed a lot every day - programming, prompting, messages, emails, etc and no pain. (It's fucking magical)
Now that I can touch type, though, I'm actually kinda interested in stenography. I wonder whether that can be as much of a force multiplier as touch typing.
EDIT: shout out to typelit as well, I discovered it here on HN (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34193504>) and it's awesome.
It can definitely be faster when typing English (court reporters do this to keep up with everyone's speaking speed), but I expect you'd need something new for other domains like programming.
I was lucky that I picked up during school so that it wasn't as much of a sacrifice of productivity.
What is your current typing habit? Do you pick-peck or is it some variation of the standard touch typing technique.
One thing I tried when I started touch typing as well was to progressively learn it. e.g.: "I'm just going to focus on using the correct finger for this one symbol/character for now" and just do that until it became natural. Can integrate that into your work potentially?
Haha, this is how I feel towards a second language. In Canada, French classes are mandantory to a certain grade - I wish I put in more effort - it's so fun knowing other languages even a bit
> It's a notable lifetime regret!
Change that ;).
Never to late - I built https://www.typequicker.com/practice (I'd welcome the feedback as well!) for this reason.
I learned touch typing in my mid twenties - took me a while to get to my current speed (partially also because I explored various split keyboards and layouts and such) but it's just a few minutes every few days
It's a shame that there's no standardized typing courses or tests nowadays. It's such a critical skill...
I often compare touch typing (and just typing fast in general) to a chef's knife skills in the kitchen.
You'd be bullied out of a kitchen immediately if you didn't know how to cut/chop properly. Yet when it comes to typing, it's not the case even though folks type on keyboards on their jobs all day long.
I built https://www.typequicker.com/practice
I can suggest trying the custom mode and just practising the symbols alone - we have the keyboard and hand visualization to help with that so you don't have to look down on the keyboard.
When I just built the site (built it out of interest for myself to learn programming and have flexibility with whatever features I wanted), this is kind of what I did.
Whatever was a pain for me to type, I'd just paste it into the custom and practice that until I got comfortable
> Do i have a way to find which keys i need to practice more on ?
Right now, the best way is probably after finishing a session, in the stats section you can see the table of characters typed or in the "Keyboard" tab as well.
You can then see which were your slowest, had most mistypes, etc
And not only characters alone but also sequences (see "Bigrams" / "Trigrams" tab in the stats section) that you type slowly.
I personally found that practising specific sequences helped - epseically if they're a common sequence in English. I add an indicator to each sequence on how common it is in the English language.
For me for example, "c" -> "e" and "e" -> "c" was really slow. This is a very common sequence. So then practicing this in the Drills mode was my strategy
> I like this site, I have been trying.
Thanks a lot - was nervous to release it so having validation is great! I would have happily continued tinkering with it in my code cave while continuing to delay the release date lol
> One suggestion to you OP, if there is a way you can make lessons and if one can practice through one by one, it would be great!
I have a feature I'm working on that's exactly this - a progression type mode. I will prioritize it on next release! Thank you for the feedback and confirming the feature idea :)
When I tried out Dvorak, I learned touch typing for Dvorak, but after a while, it started hurting from having my hands in the touch typing position, so I decided it wasn’t really worth it to continue, since the point would’ve been to reduce injury.
The way that I type is a combination of knowing where keys are, having a muscle memory of common words, and knowing how to effectively flow between them.
It seems to me though that many of the advantages of touch typing, I already have gotten without it, so it doesn’t seem to be worth it?
You are touch typing. You're just not home-row touch-typing.
I don't do it that way either, developed my own style playing multiplayer StarCraft in the late 90s/early 2000s. Home row has always felt awkward, I have small hands and have to twist my wrists to reach keys when trying it. Instead my hands mostly hover with fingertips constantly in contact, and I'm using my elbows and shoulders for coarse movements across the keyboard. I have occasionally gotten comments about how weird it looks, from people who only know home-row touch-typing.
It's just that home-row is usually the only thing taught so most people think it's the only style of touch typing.
goku12•1d ago
Learning the first layout is a bit hard and may take upto a month. Subsequent layouts are easier to learn. And you can use the same keyboard for all those layouts. I can handle US Qwerty and my native language effortlessly now. Now considering Colemak-DH. Touch typing is something I feel every programmer, writer, journalist, documenter and secretary must learn.
squigz•1d ago
budding2141•1d ago
squigz•1d ago
Regardless of what they choose to use for their leisure time, computers will still be important in school and likely at work in the future. Not to mention that many young people still use computers regularly for leisure (gaming, chatting, etc)
In any case, learning touch typing would still translate somewhat to typing on a phone - certainly things are different, but getting used to where the letters are still helps.
rekenaut•1d ago
Many people who are not tech enthusiasts will be interacting with a computer for at least 40 hours a week or more for nearly half of their lives. If you used any other tool that much, you’d want to get really good at using it. Why shouldn’t the same hold for computers today?
gundmc•1d ago
Is this true? Almost every educated adult under age ~45 that I encounter touch types. Certainly in the white-collar/tech professional sphere.
There is definitely a generational divide where it becomes far less common with those who did not grow up with ubiquitous computer usage.
jacobgorm•1d ago
chneu•1d ago
The average American definitely doesn't touch type. The average american types ~40wpm, so yeah.
orev•20h ago
We’re quickly moving to where using a physical keyboard is going to be a skill that needs to be actively taught/learned. People aren’t getting that type of incidental exposure anymore.
binbag•19h ago
vanous•1d ago
Even with touch devices, to gain productivity, i see people to switch to keyboard input because pen or touch aren't fast enough and voice typing isn't possible for example in auditoriums.
But, don't learn to type quicker, learn to type precisely. Speed will come.