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Comment by nightcracker | Hacker News Reader

> My WPM rate is sufficient that I can type almost as fast as I can think

Can you quantify this? E.g. through https://typing-speed-test.aoeu.eu/?lang=en

I don't know how fast you think.

On my second try I hit 108 WPM, in the top 1% among a sample of people who go online and take typing speed tests (probably not representative of the normal population). But it's way too easy without punctuation. Real world speeds are definitely slower.

FWIW I find that my quicker-than-average typing is still definitely not always fast enough to keep up with what I want to write down.

I type at around 120 wpm on that test, and have tried to switch to an ergodox before. And it was an utter failure. I simply couldn't endure going back to typing at 40 wpm at best, with many errors. Too high of a learning curve.

Yeah, perhaps that was too strong a statement to make without qualification. Using the linked speed test I'm consistently getting between 75-85 WPM. While typing code I have recorded speeds of up to 60WPM, this is actually pretty damn fast for writing code which generally contains a lot of special characters and obscure words.

Yeah, I think you're probably about an order of magnitude off. People speak at five times your WPM, and it feels like I can think of words to say at least twice as fast as I can say them.

Thinking about something and putting it into correct English (or the language of your choice) is a different thing though, you don't usually type a stream of consciousness. You have to figure out the grammar, spelling of uncommon words, you can change your mind and rephrase something etc... Even spoken language is easier, it's often less formal and you can carry additional information through intonation and body gesture and when you're talking directly to somebody you have direct feedback to make sure that you've been correctly understood.

My "cruising" typing speed is about 80WPM and I don't think I ever feel like I'm typing too slow, for instance while writing this comment I never felt like my mind was getting ahead of my fingers. Maybe I'm a bit slow in the head, who knows...

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