Touch typing is a very underrated skill. Few people feel the need to learn it. But it's immediately useful. The keyboard simply disappears from your mind, sparing your entire attention for the task at hand and increasing your productivity noticeably. It reduces the strain on your eyes too. Even allows you to close your eyes in between long typing sessions.
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.
The trigger for me to start practicing touch typing was when I saw a classmate trying to log into her Gmail on a classroom PC. I was shocked at how fast she did it. I started with 10FastFingers and keybr, then stick with monkeytype and typeracer. Not sure if it's made me more productive, but it feels good when your fingers can keep up with your thoughts.
For folks who want to learn typing, I recommend Jashe's Typing Guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L-P68VDSGlpLM5A9tfRvWFoh...
Wait, how common is it to not know touch typing?
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.
I somehow managed to get through over a decade as a programmer before deciding to actually learn how to touch type. I was stuck at about 60 wpm with the wrong fingering, decided to invest in learning the right approach and dropped down to 30 wpm for a while, but eventually ended up at 120 wpm after a year or so. I can't overstate how much it's changed my ability to write software. Not having to think the literal characters I'm entering and instead just watching words and symbols appear on the screen at the speed of thought makes the whole experience significantly more enjoyable. Combined with getting good at the Vim keybindings which I did around the same time, it makes programming feel like a video game. Can't recommend highly enough. I used monkeytype.com for the most part.
I did enough computer stuff before kindergarten that I could type very quickly without looking at the keyboard or thought. I did hunt and peck initially, but as I used a computer more it just got faster. When I think of any character I immediately know where on the keyboard it is. This is even if I can't see the keyboard, since the layout of any local area is uncommon enough to quickly and automatically orient. My kindergarten had a class where they wanted to teach touch typing. They did it via an automatic program where it'd explain some concept, then have you type some sequences to practice it. I decided to give this strategy (with the home row, feeling the bumps, etc.) a chance. I was quite a bit slower with it. Eventually, I got frustrated with the slow progress and just sped through typing each sequence in the way that I knew how. I finished a few month course in like 30 minutes. Today I type the fastest out of anyone whom I know, beating many people who use traditional touch typing methods.
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.
I've been messing with keybr daily for a while now and have retrained myself to do things more properly but two things about doing everything the "right" way bother me:
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.
Qwerty is top-row heavy. In my experience, a natural fast typer will naturally lean away from home row "touch typing" to a top-middle row hover style of typing. You have to use an alternate layout to really grasp what home row typing should be. Also, Z (and similar for the whole left bottom row) should be pressed with the ring finger. I'm really curious why anyone would use the pinky there, unless your hand is angled to the left.
What taught me to touch type was moving to a split keyboard. Using my old method was slow since my hands naturally wanted to press the keys on the other side. So I was basically "forced" to learn it.
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.
I'm surprised that we are mentioning a paid site here and we are not mentioning tools like monkeytype and typeracer where you can do good practice for absolute free. In this particular space monkeytype is a super customizable tool that can fit tons of different people.
I self learned touch typing. I dont need to look at the keyboard for typing english. But I still struggle with special chars and the number row. Cant find anything good to help with that.
I type somewhat fast, so I labored for years under the impression that I already knew touch typing. But the reality is I didn't -- like I don't keep my fingers on the home row, and I make tons of mistakes that I mindlessly correct using Bksp.
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 learnt touch typing with KDE's Ktouch (a touch typing tutor program), which has auto-generated courses for various layouts but also has a manually laid-out course for Dvorak. It really made me appreciate how well Dvorak works for learning TT, because when a Qwerty course has me just typing out sdfjkl nonsensical gibberish, the Dvorak course had me typing silly but memorable stuff like 'none hunt out the one ton nun'. And yeah, just having actual words to type from lesson 2 on really made me feel a sense of progression which gave me the motivation to power on through it even when I started running into the limits of my dexterity.
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.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really see the advantage myself for touch typing. My current style of typing already reaches me 110+wpm, and it feels natural without any wrist problems, and I also can type fine without looking at the keyboard. (Perhaps the lack of wrist problems part is because of young age, but I’ve been typing for over 10 years)
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?
I think this is one of those things that's way easier if you start early. Not sure if schools still have typing classes now. I vaguely remember mine in the 90s, but I didn't really get fast until I started playing MUDs and typing was a matter of life and death!
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
While I can definitely see the ability to type faster as an advantage in some cases, I don't think I'll ever bother going through the process of learning it. From decades of software development I can type fast enough for whatever it is I need without looking at the keyboard and not once have I felt that the bottleneck of my productivity is the the speed that I type. Most of the time goes into thinking how to do it right so that it doesn't have to be done again... And with code generation becoming better all the time, I believe the abstraction layers were one will have to spend more time on will get even higher.
I was hoping it would speak to the second part more - why is it worth it?
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?
I've tried getting better at touch typing a few times. Interestingly, if I do so, I get pretty bad wrist/finger pain (rsi I guess?) so I've not stuck with it.
Here is how I learned touch-typing dvorak-fr :
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 BĂ©po layout and wish I knew it too.
What helped me finally learn touch typing was unlabeled key caps, for both my keyboards at work and home.
What's hard about it is that no matter how many exercises I do every day, I then have to go back to work and be able to fully type at the speed I am used to. So, I can't really build the habit of touch typing or get faster at it because of that.
Yeah I had a touch typing class for a quarter in 8th grade. I repeatedly cheated by lifting the paper obscuring my hands and never learned how to type. It's a notable lifetime regret!
I like this site, I have been trying. 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!
For those as old as me- we learned in grade school on IBM selectric typewriters- then when I learned Basicc it came in handy typing punch cards
I switched to Dvorak twice. Once in high school because I thought it would be fun, but I bought a labelled keyboard cover and never really learnt it.
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.