A Keyboard with Blank Keycaps Made Me an Expert Typist

Yeah, that was my first thought - I haven't looked at the keys since I was a teenager. Doesn't mean I don't still mistype things.

Hey I'll take the keyboard. This would be a major blessing :)

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Really? I LOVE the HHKBPro2 have 3 of them, one at Work one at Home-Workstation and one for the Laptop

>but if you're learning to type, why would you do that

Sometimes people don't try hard if there is no fear of failure. Removing the key labels makes it harder to cheat and forces you to do it the right way. Some people will rationalize in their head ("oh it's just this one email I am typing, I am so far behind I can't afford to be slowed down"). I can see this method being effective by "forcing" people to learn to touch type.

Agreed about not looking at the keys. I know this is HN and people are always looking for technical solutions, but sometimes the best solution is the easiest.

I learned to type in college over a few weeks one summer while I was typing abstracts into a database. I thought I would never finish the work because I couldn’t type, so I forced myself to learn to touch type. I didn’t even put stickers on the keys; but I really think having real sentences to type, on topics that were of interest to me, helped. However, on the technology side, I have to admit, the clicky Apple II keyboard, with the cupped keys, was a benefit. But, if kids can learn to “type” on glass (mobile devices) as fast as they do, I think all it really takes is time and dedication.

Typing of the Dead: Overkill (the version on Steam) isn't as good a typing tutor as the original as it doesn't focus on getting you better at typing - it throws you in at the deep end, starting with whole words. The previous game instead started with the traditional home row stuff and would show your accuracy on each key. You can still play the original under Wine or on Windows.

Overkill is still a great game. There's a nice backstory to its release: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/203801/How_Typing_of_the...

> I get that you could cheat if you had a regular keyboard, but if you're learning to type, why would you do that?

I think for some folks it’s a real cognitive challenge to willingly ignore useful information.

I know it was for me; I needed a das keyboard to make the learn-to-type “metagame” have sufficiently imperfect information to become “playable” enough for me to stick with it.

My first IBM-compatible, a Commodore PC20-III, came with Mavis Beacon's Typing Tutor, which did wonders for me.

Typing of the dead is a lot of fun, especially going the extra mile of having the characters wear backpack dreamcasts and keyboards. There's a grindhouse-esque sequel Overkill as well.

I bought a WASD VP3. Same basic shape as the HHKB with a different layout of the fancy stuff. Fn key is in a natural position for me. I use the Fn arrow keys constantly (ijkl) I love it so much I'm going to buy at least a few more before I die. I can't get enough of it.

> I get that you could cheat if you had a regular keyboard, but if you're learning to type, why would you do that? And even if you do cheat and look, you could still practice the hand movements.

In my experience, I did look more than intended to, and more than I thought I did. What really drove this home was not a blank keyboard but a mislabeled one (created, at the time, by popping key caps off and rearranging, being sure to preserve F and J).

The HHKB Lite is totally different and pretty awful, regular HHKBs are great though! I used a Lite a few years ago and it had some of the worst rubber domes I've ever felt, nearly every key felt like it had a different actuation weight. The arrow keys were especially bad.

With blank keycaps there's no way to cheat, it forces you to learn everything on the keyboard you use regardless of how often it is used. I have touch typed most of my life and switching to blank keycaps 5 years ago forced me to master all of the keyboard, specifically the less used keys.

Its also fun watching people try and type on your blank keycaps - they are all almost instantly lost at how to even start typing.

> I get that you could cheat if you had a regular keyboard, but if you're learning to type, why would you do that?

I sometimes look to align myself when I've had my hands off the keyboard, and now that I've got the wrong keycaps on some letters[1], it throws me off sometimes (I'll start on K or ; instead of L). However, when I'm actually typing, I almost never look at the keys (usually only when I'm pausing anyway, and more to take my eyes off the screen for a second). My only training has been using a keyboard for 20+ years.

It's not 'proper' touch typing - I almost never use my little fingers (I use three on my left hand, but bias towards just using index/index and middle on my right), I've got a tendency to reach across with either index finger depending on what I've just typed, and my hands at rest are around AWD/JIO rather than the home row - but I've never felt limited by my typing speed (80-100 WPM if I'm copying something).

I suspect my typing style is largely habits developed from gaming more then typing when growing up (rest on AWD and being more fluent with my left hand).

[1] Laptop keyboard - S where I should be (I got an S sent by mistake for a broken C key, and the I broke later), moved Fn keys to replace L and E

What does the Happy Hacking Keyboard usually run price wise?

Or you could just put a box over your keyboard, like my typing teacher used to do when she saw me lookin

HHKB is Sun Type 3 keyboard in 60% so it’s not ANSI or Windows 101, Ctrl to the left of A and all. Mostly should be the same as ANSI though?

A cheaper alternative would have been to put a towel over your hands so that you can't look down at the keys.

I re-learned to touchtype .. i had typing in middle school.. it was a per-requisite to computer classes (ah the late 80s). But my touch typing deteriorated quite rapidly as I was mostly using computers to play games and the like. Lots of wizardry and bards tale mean's lots of hunt and peck.

When I got the itch to start programming more, I simply took a box, cut the bottom and front off of it and laid it over my, still amazing to this day, Apple ADB (apple //gs) keyboard and started typing. I could always lift my hands and the box to see where some troublesome symbol was. Something you can't do with blank caps.

The one thing that threw me off when I finally switched to terminals and pc's in my college days was that apple had been putting homing bumps on d and k instead of f and j.. On my first PC keyboard I actually swapped the d/f and j/k keycaps just so i could stay sane. Eventually I got used to the f/j homing. Now I use a board where all the homerow keys are homing and it doesn't much bother me anymore.

An argument for a smaller keyboard (and this is definitely a personal thing) is that I try my hardest to avoid using keys that are more than one key away from a finger in its resting position anyway (why---I really don't like having to move my hand physically, and I'm willing to pay the cost of additional latency with having more keys gated behind modifiers if it means I have to move my hand less). My day-to-day keyboard uses QMK, so it's really possible to make this work.

The reason I use a 60% keyboard is that I can keep the mouse closer to the centre, which saves my right shoulder.

I also learned to touch-type at an early age, but incorrectly. I can easily do 90+ wpm and closer to 110 when younger, but certain keys on my keyboard are bound to the wrong fingers.

For example, I always end up moving my entire left hand several centimeters to the right so my left index finger can reach the "Y" key. So every time I type a "Y" character my entire left hand shifts unnecessarily back and forth.

I share your perspective with this. It's a fun idea. I've been a touch typist my whole life. But I did recently switch my default keyboard to International so I can type in French and Spanish, as accents are common to both languages but not included in the Windows 10 American English keyboard. I mention this because it has easily halved, if not hanged, drawn and quartered my typing speed. I'm several months in and still need to "test" touch type when I need a ç or ñ. So, I know speed comes down to muscle memory.

Really, it's not the blank keycaps that improved this person's typing speed. It was the deliberate focus on training their senses to memorize the way the tension in their left ring finger, or the way their right thumb extended to the left a little.

One fun and maybe not so novel use for this though would be training yourself to touch type AZERTY and QWERTY interchangeably. The blank keycaps would make it easy to switch between layouts and not run into a focus conflict like trying to mentally envision the A key, struggling to place it then looking down to see Q and having to fight your brain to not dump your mental priming for AZERTY and return memory for QWERTY. (There's a specific term for this in cognitive science. I want to say "trigger", but that's definitely not it. It refers to when a mylenated path is triggered by your senses and overrides your present thought.)

I’ve been using a 60% keyboard for a couple of years now, with a Magic Trackpad off to the right. The total size is about that of a full size keyboard (with numpad).

The thing about 60% and ten-keyless keyboards, is the smaller size means your hands travel less. Yeah, some common things are now chords as opposed to discrete keys.

But chords are easy to learn if you’re using them every day. They’re not for everyone, just like any accessibility feature.

Above all, the 60% keyboard is more comfortable.

I think blank keys are the way to go if you want to improve your typing ability. It may not be worth it for you in particular since you already type at 90-110 WPM, but in general I'd argue that if blank keys are frustrating, that frustration is evidence of your need to have those blank keys.

I too learned to type at a young age. I can type without making mistakes at 120 WPM. I also used to be a stenographer, which for the uninitiated involves typing on a specially designed keyboard for the purpose of recording transcripts. In order to graduate as a stenographer you're required to type at 240 WPM with at least 98% accuracy (which is achievable thanks to the keyboards special design).

I know from this experience that looking at your hands / the keyboard while typing drastically hinders your ability to become a good typer. Given that you type at 90-110 WPM already, the benefit for you would really only be for the obscure keys you rarely press. It's clearly very effective for breaking poor typing habits, though.

You really just need to force your brain to form a complete model of the keyboard in your head. Even looking at an image of your keyboard layout while typing (and thus not looking at your hands) hinders how well you learn. During the first semester of stenography classes they had an image of the keyboard layout blown up and hanging on the wall. How well people did correlated very well with whether or not they ever glanced at this image.

Blank keyboards prevent these bad habits from forming, and break the bad habits if they're already formed. Considering you already type at 90-110 WPM, the frustration you'd experience may not be worth it to you, but arguably you're not the target audience.

I'm typing this one a 65% right now, and it's simply "I want more space on my desk (for other junk)". This keyboard is completely usable. I never use half of the F row anyways, and removes a few redundant keys like the duplicate alt/ctrl on the right hand I never use.

> I really don't get why anyone would want less keys.

For the same reason many people prefer keyboard shortcuts over moving the hand back and forth between mouse and keyboard.

My main keyboard has 42 keys; that's enough for all letters, most common symbols and modifiers. Everything else is quickly reachable by holding down one of two "FN" keys.

Why? Because this way I can input anything without even moving my hands or wrists. And as both FN keys are directly below my thumbs I don't suffer from any delay when typing any special symbols or numbers. In fact my typing speed has stayed exactly the same, possibly even with increased accuracy because my hands are always guaranteed to be in the correct position for every input(outside the period of getting used to the layout of course).

So for me personally it's a number of advantages without a single drawback, except maybe the fact I now find standard keyboards really cumbersome and awkward to use.

> I really don't get why anyone would want less keys.)

One unintended benefit of my 60% keyboard is less travel with my right arm when switching from keyboard to mouse. Over the course of the workday it adds up.

However conversely, in this modern era with 2FA codes for many sites... Inputting 2FA codes is now a royal pain in the ass.

Learning to type really makes a difference in productivity. My typing skills took a huge leap when I worked in a computer lab that had bad lighting and green terminal screens. You couldn't see the markings on the keys... ancient Zenith terminals hooked up to a VAX.

This could be survivor bias. I hunted and pecked for the first ~15 years without pain. Then had problems within the first 3 years of touch typing. My guess is, like sports, some people won the genetic lottery and/or had training and time to perfect their craft more easily than others.

My parents put me in a touch-typing class when I was young. You just needed discipline to not look at the keycaps, or just tape over the letters while you're practicing.

I'm in about the same WPM range as you. It's one of the greatest skills I've ever learned. It's invaluable in todays world. I regularly just keep typing while looking at someone. This was especially useful while taking notes in college.

> I think having blank keycaps though is kind of silly, personally. Especially given the keyboard the author has gone with. If you sat me in front of that keyboard I wouldn't know where to begin due to its size and layout.

Buying a novelty keycaps (or a whole keyboard with blank caps) seems overkill. Just tape over the keys and remove them when you can touch-type comfortably.

Having blank-keycaps would only annoy other people need to use my computer for something. It's just a novelty that I personaly feel like it adds anything.

"I really don't get why anyone would want less keys"

Size. I have used an HHKB2 for ~3 years now, with blank keycaps, and I've been quite happy. I find myself rarely needing to use function keys so often that it becomes an issue.

I also used a split, ortholinear Let's Splitv2 that I built myself, with blank keycaps. But not having the number row kinda sucked. I may try it again soon.

Though there are a few situations where I'd want a full, standard keyboard layout, with a numpad:

* Data entry

* Playing videogames that have a lot of commands like DotA2. Chording is simply not fast enough / too much cognitive overhead during high apm moments.

> I'm the odd-man out when it comes to keyboards though

I assume I'm in the extreme minority as my preferred keyboard is the floppy silicone style [1].

They wear out after a couple years, and usually whoever made the previous one has gone out of business by then, so getting replacements is a bit of pain.

The things I love about this style of keyboard though:

1. More or less silent to type on. No louder than just tapping your fingers on your desk.

2. The fact that they are completely flat on the desk seems to prevent any of the wrist strain that I get from a traditional keyboard.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06WWM5TC6

Did you learn it on a old mechanical typewriter?

People at my school used to do that. I did not care about carrying that X kg suitcase with me every Friday to school. Being already active on irc already at young age, at some point i got so annoyed of typing so slow and while typing missing what was being written on screen by others, i simply forced myself to look at the screen and type. Progress happened quite fast and that was most encouraging to keep going.

But 90-110 words per minute, that's blazing fast. Think i'm stuck at about 60 words per minute (https://typing-speed.net/keystrokes-per-minute)

Touch typing isn't only about speed. It's also about health and RSI, especially if you use an ergonomic layout like a Dvorak.

For me it made a difference, and I went from feeling pain after an hour of typing, to being able to type all day without the slightest issue.

I can type at maybe 70 wpm. It's useful for chatting more than for developing. I learned keyboarding technique in grade school (PAWS) and mostly ignored proper technique, but took a keyboarding class in high school for fun, and was on IRC at the time, so lots of typing. At the beginning of class, my speed was faster with whatever I was doing, but at the end, proper technique won out, although I was faster and more accurate with both methods than at the beginning.

I went through a Dvorak phase in college, it was fun, but switching layouts is weird, and qwerty is everywhere, so I stuck with the standard.

I think most people could train up to about 60 wpm if they wanted to, but like 30-40 wpm is enough that you wouldn't normally be hindered by slow typing. You won't do great in Typer Shark or Typing of the Dead, but you should do alright.

Edit to add: no labels is fine on letters, pretty brutal for all the keys.

I think it's more about mind melding with the problem you are solving. Having absolutely nothing else cognitively distracting you from what you are doing gives you that additional working memory space to tackle complex problems. It's not sufficient, there are a bunch of other factors, but to my mind, if you have to think at all about typing, you can't achieve that top echelon of concentration.

Here’s a video of geohot thinking and coding at the same time and you’ll see how fast typing helps him resolve ideas quickly: https://youtu.be/RFaFmkCEGEs

Doesn't that mean typing 20% faster would save you half an hour on a given workday?

As a developer, I think my process is more like ~50% thinking and debugging and ~50% actual typing. That latter 50% is divided into 20% typing code but about 30% typing mails/slack/tasks or whatever I need to do to update other people (without calling, because that is scary :-))

if you count typing emails or IMs as thinking or work mostly solo then you're right. in a large team being able to type an email quickly is quite useful.

30% is a lot.

For me when I actually am typing it is a complete thought already and now I am waiting to get it out so I can move on to the next thing.

If I could type infinitely fast I could spend 100% of my time thinking.

> I never understood the fascination with typing optimization

Touch typing is about the combination of speed and accuracy. You're right that in these discussions people always talk about speed, but that hidden accuracy bonus is useful for everyone.

As others have said, it's not just a question of going faster. It's a question of comfort and not having to fight things. Having an uncomfortable chair or dim / washed out / fuzzy screen is not going to change if your code is right or wrong, but it's something less that's bugging you.

For the question at hand, I'm inclined to think that what matters most is not so much typing speed as typing accuracy. If I have to constantly go back and fix a typo it's a just a PITA. I'm by no means a fast typist, but I think I make fairly few errors. So whenever I have to use an unfamiliar keyboard, the biggest issue I have is mistyping things and having to constantly go back and fix them. Also, modifier keys not being where I expect them aggravates me to no end.

Some people have fun optimizing their workspace and habits. We spend a lot of time at our computers and tweaking things adds a more interesting veneer. So they try things like different monitor setups or learning to touch type. The benefit probably doesn't outweigh the effort, but not everything needs to pay off like that.

Sometimes the brain is the bottleneck of development, other times it's the fingers...

The more time spent typing, the less you have for thinking and debugging.

Hypothetically, someone with a hunt and peck technique might be 40/60. Someone with a self taught but undisciplined technique could be 60/40. Someone with standard touch typing might be 70/30. Someone who does regular typing drills could be 80/20.

Given the thinking and debugging is where are value comes from, the typing is just how we make it tangible, by improving your typing you are improving your value.

I see this comment on almost every HN and r/programming thread about typing. It always puts an idea in my head of a programmer who has to stop and ponder between every keystroke.

Not related to touch typing but the same is true of the eyes, focusing at a fixed distance all day kills the muscles.

I would guess that's often the issue with RSI as well, that the muscles don't get enough variation. I've practiced a lot of martial arts, yoga and rock climbing along the way and never had any problems despite spending A LOT of time with keyboards.

I think hunt-and-peck is still a repetitive motion that can cause problems of its own. I think it's better to take care of your hands with strengthening exercises and the like (I got some from an OT and they helped) than to just rely on not having proper technique.

MacOS’ cmd is a thumb press for me, except “cmd+space” which I just reposition my whole hand for, and making caps lock a control (a setting available in the system settings, not an addon or command line tweak or anything) means no more scrunching my wrist down and left to reach that. I miss the cmd thing very much when I’m not on Mac, and I did 15ish years of Windows and Linux first so it’s not because that’s what I knew first.

OTOH by making trackpads not-hell to use they’ve allowed me to discover that too many days in a row of that wreck my right wrist pretty badly.

More people need to realise this and be cautious of such fads. I got caught up into the whole touch-typing hype and continued typing in that awkward posture for 3 months straight more than 12 hours a day and didn't stop even when my hands, shoulders and neck started hurting due to the awkward posture that's caused by touch-typing.

I am in the worst pain of my life right now. Absolutely regret it. Sure the error rate is slightly higher and you type slower. Atleast you won't be f*cked with RSI.

I've heard one is supposed to use the palm to press Ctrl and not pinky. Though IME the palm is awkward and difficult to use precisely. Maybe it gets better with practice.

Swapping control and caps is another alternative, though in that case it's still using the pinky.

The point on RSI is too often overlooked.

Beyond typing, it applies when considering any specific position or movement to be the only ‘correct’ form and optimize to do it again and again in that exact specific way.

However correct it is supposed to be, that’s a recipe for RSI. One way to mitigate that is to take frequent breaks, other ways include deoptimizing your movements to have more variation, rotating input methods, use a different hand etc.

Basically, extreme optimization and sticking to correctness is in my opinion overrated.

I think it's important to develop one's own style to fit one's needs. Touch typing isn't a system to follow -- it's a goal to achieve. I touch-type, but for example, I always use left shift and never use right shift. And when I do hold left shift, the other fingers on my left hand shift one key to the left (i.e. index on D, ring on A). And I'm someone who has done past work in typesetting and writing legal briefs, so I ain't no slouch. Maybe there's some theoretical inefficiency I could choose to iron out, but I haven't yet been hindered by my typing speed.

I've been touch typing naturally for way over a decade without paying much attention to technique. I have never felt (or paid attention to?) discomfort before reading about RSIs on HN. After looking into the lack of science around it and reading Dr. Sarno's book I have decided it's not something that's worth caring or thinking about. And perhaps even a dangerous idea.

I feel terrible for everyone experiencing this pain, but I'm not convinced it's something that can be reliably developed or avoided.

Obviously if you're feeling pain or discomfort for your own sake take a break or switch to a different finger for a few minutes. Just like you'd switch sides in bed or change your sitting style when feeling discomfort. But IMO this obsessing about developing an RSI is unhealthy.

I didn't get much of a typing education despite being slightly pre-iphone. And my father, who learned to code with punch cards, and wrote code for decades, typed with only two fingers...

It was only after relearning to type, but with a new keyboard layout (colemak), did I find myself able to touch type.

I remember an old manager, who was probably born in the mid 1960s giving our team's intern (around 2008) a hard time because it was taking her time to get used to QWERTY again because she spent the previous 6 months in France on an AZERTY keyboard. I can't be the only one who noticed that he looked at his hands noticeably more than anyone else on the team while typing, even the intern he was giving a hard time. I think it just takes a lot of motivation to learn to touch-type if you didn't grow up with ubiquitous computers. My manager was so used to looking down at his hands that he didn't even notice he did it.

There's a golden window for touch-typing where most people in the U.S. grew up typing on computers constantly (especially IMing in multiple windows concurrently) and before smartphones arrived. It's nearly impossible to keep up with multiple IM windows without lots of typing and spelling errors unless you're at least close to touch-typing.

I grew up on a Mac, and it took me way too long to get used to using the delete key on a PC. (I think very few Mac users make much use of Fn-Delete to get PC-like delete functionality.) Typing habits die hard.

I took typing in high school, with IBM typewriters as well. For 50 minutes, we typed away, starting with fingers on the home rows. I learned to type business letters, notes, and even use proper spacing. By the way, we were taught to put 2 spaces after period. Typing class was one of my favorite, with no homework, and just 50 minutes of typing away every day.

It was covered in my public school education, but we did it in grade school (late 90s, early aughts).

I remember that back during the heyday of AIM and Runescape (which were incredibly popular at my school), students became better typists than our teachers.

A friend of mine is a high school teacher now, and has lamented to me how smartphones (particularly autocorrect) have ruined students' typing and spelling abilities.

I'm a bit older than you, and the typing class I took in high school (or was it junior high?) was the best thing I ever did. That was in the '70's sometime and we still had mechanical typewriters. It was not yet obvious that keyboard skills would be super important in the future world, so I don't remember what attracted me to the class.

Later in college someone as a prank removed all the keytops from a time sharing terminal. Didn't stop me, I just sat down and started typing.

When I took typing in school back in ~2001 we still did it on typewriters and we were not allowed to use correction tape. Having a sheet of paper fixed over the keyboard so we couldn't see it was also mandatory. That almost everyone had access to a computer at home did not matter, but I'm pretty sure most people who took the class became proficient typists in the process, I certainly did

It was a part of school when I attended, amongst other computer skills.

I have a sister who is 7 years younger than me. When she attended the same schools, the computer courses had already begun scaling back. The justification was that "kids just know how to use them". This included explicit typing class because "Kids don't need to be taught that anymore. They already know!".

Same story for me up to the IBM selectrics.

60-80 is slow to average, though, no? I had the same issue as you with coding sigils, and "proper" touch typing didn't help at all, so I just remapped [] {} to Tab+hjkl and the parentheses to the shift keys, which helps more because I don't have to stretch.

Oh man, I did a similar thing in grad school, but I made the mistake of trying to keep both layouts in my head. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I couldn't seem to do it. I finally committed to Dvorak and it has scored me some nerd cred over the years.

Interestingly, numbers and symbols continued to trip me up, and they are one of the few areas of overlap between QWERTY and Dvorak. I finally switched to a blank keyboard and that did seem to help.

In my opinion, the reason people don't learn to touchtype is that the QWERTY keyboard layout doesn't reward touchtyping. You have to beat yourself up to "force" yourself to keep your hands over the home keys, because the natural use for QWERTY is to wander away from the home row.

If you learn Dvorak, or, frankly, any layout designed to minimize movement, you will naturally learn to touchtype, because the layout rewards being on the home row. You don't have to try to force yourself to stay on the home row, your hands will be there anyhow. And from there, with your newfound hand stability, it's not hard to learn to touch type without looking. It'll just happen and one day you'll notice that you've been doing it for weeks.

It may literally be easier to switch to Dvorak than to whip yourself hard enough to learn to "touchtype" on QWERTY.

I'm in the same boat as you! Just started working on proper touch-typing a few weeks ago, as I sometimes found myself being ashamed of my self-taught ~7-finger typing system.

Commenting primarily to see what others have to say about your idea, since I can notice that sometimes when I don't pay full attention I tend to use my "old" mental keymap and cheat a little bit.

I switched keyboards to a linear one in December, which forced me to learn to touch-type properly (I need to write a post about that). I have the same experience as you, I only got slower, without any other benefits.

"Proper" touch typing (I typed without looking before too, but not the "proper" way) is overrated and has proven to me less useful than the way I was used to.

I have the same problem: I can type fast but not properly — 120 wpm with 2 fingers — and any attempt I’ve made to learn to type “properly” has decreased my error rate... and my speed so much that any error-rate reduction gains aren’t worth it. I feel like, after typing a specific way for decades, it’s practically impossible to ever change effectively.

There's an interesting discovery scientist have made about those learning a second language or a new skill.

They learn at an incredible rate when they first start (as you'd expect) and it eventually starts to slow down over time (again, as you'd expect) until it hits a plateau, at which it sometimes never overcomes (or it does but stops at the next plateau). I believe they call this the OK-Plateau, for how you feel about your new skills when you reach this point, OK.

The idea is, learning levels off when we internally (and often subconsciously) determine we're "good enough" at a certain thing. For language learner's it may be when they decide they're conversational, or when they one day stop bothering to look up new words because they think their vocabulary is good enough for their needs.

You're likely at this point and need to critically examine your weaknesses and make a plan to train them if you really want to progress.

On an interesting side note here, this is often the value that coaches provide to aspiring athletes, someone who can identify your plateaus by analyzing your movement, abilities, etc.. and plan your training to isolate and tackle them.

Some VR experiences (e.g. Windows VR) allow you to have a "flashlight" which is a circular cutout in VR that actually just shows your VR headset's camera. You can control this space by pointing your controller like a flashlight, so you can keep it pointed towards your keyboard or whatever you want to keep an eye on without having to take off your headset.

I usually use it when I need to find my water bottle or to take a peek at my phone.

What VR headset are you using? I've considered switching to a VR monitor setup but I feel that the quality of existing headsets is too low to compete against an actual monitor and having a screen with text that close to the eyes for several hours will accelerate the accumulation of eye damage most developers already receive.

> there are a bunch of productivity apps emerging which give you awesome giant monitors and workspaces in VR

Can you point out some? I looked into this last fall and was rather disappointed about what was available.

With layers as supported by https://docs.qmk.fm/#/ you won't need dedicated arrow keys (put them on the home row in a different layer), nor would you need to switch to vim necessarily. That is at least my experience.

For laptops, you could also just stick some paper squares on the keycaps.

I like the way you think. This is what I told my son when he asked me why I have blank keycaps.

I live in France and I've found that having a QWERTY keyboard has pretty much the same effect, even for people who look at the keys when they type and even though my computer is set up to use the keyboard as QWERTY (so pressing any key does what the key says).

That was my idea, too. On the occasion where I let someone use it, they stare at it like the keyboard is intimidating them. I tell them "either you know how to type, or you don't," and that gives them the confidence to continue.

If you really want to confuse people, get something like a split ortho board or a 40% keyboard. Even without blank keycaps people at work used to be very confused seeing my Keebio Iris and they're very fun to build and type on!

My brother used a regular qwerty keyboard to learn dvorak, which comes with the added bonus of internalizing a sane layout.

Similar experience. In the dorms (single room assignment, bathroom shared with a suitemate), I was one in maybe a handful who threw down for private broadband service with legit throughput and was willing to share. Friends would bother me all the time to hop on for stupid shit. When the OG Das Keyboard launched, I picked one up (still have it today and still works, although caps lock light won't illuminate unless pressure is applied to the top-right corner where the light is positioned). The random visits stopped shortly thereafter, except for one girl who grew up on the same island as I did and was determined enough to bring her own keyboard for the privilege...and other fringe benefits.

I'm the same. When I was in high school, I couldn't afford a Das Keyboard. So I spray painted my keyboard so that I could get the same effect. I'm still using that keyword 16 years later and all my subsequent keyboards were all with blank caps.

I took a similar course, in High School in the 1970s, where we learned how to type in a room full of manual typewriters with blank keys.

We had a little cardboard hood thing that went over the whole keyboard and covered our hands.

I started wanting to switch to a blank keyboard when I realised that I never look at my hands when I'm typing anyway. Finally got a Das Keyboard S as a present a few years ago and it's been awesome. These days I forget it's unusual until someone else sits down at my computer and looks bewildered. :)

I didn't tried too hard, but, I couldn't get faster than 110-120 with standard QWERTY finger placement. I assume you had to use a few tricks to get faster than that which I never tried.

Very similar to my story. But I'm curious, why would you need to use blank keycaps to learn Dvorak? I have always just typed on a regular QWERTY keyboard with software remapping to make it Dvorak. In that case, looking down at the keys while trying to learn is useless (except for the M and the A key!), so you learn not to do it just as you would with blank keycaps.

Overall I'm pretty happy that that I learned Dvorak and feel that my typing is much better than it ever was with Qwerty. However I'm always hesistant to recommend that other people follow the same path. There are numerous downsides to Dvorak (or any non-standard layout)

* I have kind of un-learned Qwerty. When I have to go to someone else's machine at work (game dev studio) to diagnose a crash, Qwerty feels very foreign and I look like an idiot when I go to type (looking up and down, making lots of mistakes, and generally typing like an old uncle who has never used a computer). This is a bit less of a problem now that Covid has hit and we are all working remote and screen-sharing instead of visiting each other's physical machines.

* Family members get annoyed when they come to a computer and it is on "Dvorak Mode", and they don't know how to get it "back to normal". Having separate accounts helps with this, though I have had some Dvorak software that sometimes annoyingly "leaked through" to other user accounts, switching the settings for my wife

* Shortcuts are a pain. Some software (particularly things like 3D modeling packages) have tons of shortcuts and they are all well thought out around the idea that you have a QWERTY keyboard (the important shortcuts will be in the left hand, like mode-changing keys on QWER so that you can use a mouse with your right hand). It sort of sucks when you go to use those softwares and the hotkeys are all over the place. This even applies to the normal Cut/Paste/Copy hotkeys. I have software-remapped those so they are in the same location as QWERTY (on Windows, using Autohotkey) but that causes secondary issues where Ctrl-K shortcuts are unavailable because the V key is K in the Dvorak layout and I'm using that for pasting. vi/vim is also weird on Dvorak, but I stay away from those anyhow.

* It is hard to know where keys are when not in the "touch typing position". This kind of goes along with the last point about shortcuts. Since my physical keyboard is QWERTY, I cannot look at it and know where are particular key is. And all of my training in Dvorak is muscle-memory so I only know where the letters are by feel and not by knowing which QWERTY key they are mapped to. Consequently, trying to press a specific letter hotkey when my hand is not in the standard "home row" position is a bit of a guessing game. This is a problem in situations like using a 3D software where you are mostly mousing and only poking at hotkeys here and there. Obviously getting a labelled keyboard would solve this issue, but there are other downsides to that as well. (confusing other family members with my strange keyboard, paying extra for a niche product and having more limited choices)

If you can get past all of those issues... Dvorak is fantastic!

> but the only place I ever need to use a Qwerty keyboard these days is the touch keyboard on my phone.

Can't you just set your keyboard on your phone to Dvorak? If yours can't, I do know of a few third-party ones that can, at least on Android.

I've got RSA Type 2 and Trigger-finger four years ago and I was told if I continue like that I may not be able to use a keyboard for a very long time. It started with lots of pain and discomfort and then got worst with trigger-finger. What a nightmare!

I had many years without touch typing and when the pain started, I was already doing touch typing for more than 3 years. But, neither me nor the doctor couldn't blame touch typing for it. I was told any repetitive movement can cause it. Perhaps touch typing does kick in. But, the main cause was lack of any exercise with hands. I was only using my hands on my keyboard for a very long time.

I'm still doing touch typing. I actually stopped physiotherapy exercises for my hands shortly. Instead, I started to do sports and normal exercises to keep my muscles healthy. I've also switched to a split keyboard (Kinesis Advantage 2) with some customization on the layout to tweak it for coding. Seriously one of my best purchases ever. Since then I actually invest on my work equipment and office tools. Good monitor, proper desk and ergo chair. They last forever, and it's way cheaper than breaking your body.

It definitely does on a staggered layout keyboard. There's a lot of good alternatives mentioned in the comments like the ergodox and whatnot that can help alleviate that awkward positioning. The rabbit hole of keyboard building and ergonomics is endless. The subreddit r/OLKB is a good starting point.

I have also noticed this effect with the layout; I find the common staggered layout on keyboards encourages people to use the wrong finger for a couple keys, especially with fast typing speeds where you intuitively start optimising movements.

An ortholinear layout makes those keys only easily accessible with the correct fingers, and overcoming that part of the muscle memory was the hardest part of the switch for me.

And what's even better is vertical stagger according to finger lengths; this increases comfort when typing significantly in my experience, especially on very small keyboards.

I think the argument is if you can't look down you work harder at remembering it because that easy reference isn't there.

I use a blank keycap keyboard. There are little raised dots on the F and J keys to find your placement without looking down.

Two reasons to use one: 1) security - slows down most people when “borrowing” your computer. 2) looking cool and being able to joke that it used to have keycaps but you type so much that they all wore off

I did the same my first winter break of college years ago. I think I'd preferred I had learned Colemak or Workman, but the benefit is much smaller so I never bothered (it's a great layout for thumbs though).

However, this is precisely why I buy and use QWERTY keyboards. When I'm first installing a machine or I'm dropped into ash because of a hard drive issue or that new shiny game has the layout set up for QWERTY instead of reading the current layout, I know I can always look down to get my bearings long enough to swap the layout/control or do that quick debug.

Almost the same here I learned touch typing because I wanted to handle many chats on Facebook, when the web interface was all they had.

All 9th graders at my school were required to take typing. I asked to be excused but this was refused. On the first day of class I flipped to the end of the lesson book and did the assignments. The teacher, to her everlasting credit, told the department head that the class was a waste of my time and I was allowed to transfer to AP computer science. Which was also a waste of time (on account of the curriculum, not due to my ability.) It really annoyed my sister to be in class with her younger brother.

I had a 1 year course of typing in 1st grade secondary school (12y old). At the time (1994) we used mechanical typewriters and a cloth keyboard cover. We did pages of typing and if you got 1 char wrong you had to repeat the full page.

At that same time i was programming games in Basic and C, so i knew i was going to benefit from it (the majority of kids thought it was a girls' class... this being an all male school).

Fast forward 30 years i am a happy 100wpm typist. And when I see programmers struggling to find keys I just wonder how more productive they would be if they didn't have to think about it.

With regards to coding, yeah maybe speed of entering text doesn't matter that much, but IMHO speed of navigating around and changing text might still matter. Being able to "blindly" edit the text IMHO makes a difference. Also usually as a developer, in my experience writing non-code text (email, chat etc) is still taking a lot of time

> and do not regularly use them because their phone/tablet is the primary computing device.

… maybe someday, but I think it's a bit premature? Phone keyboards were terrible, involving hacks like T9 to make them tolerable for the longest time. Smart phones haven't been around that long; the iPhone wasn't introduced until mid-2007. That's only a little more than a decade, so unless you're close to 20, you're going to remember / have learned on something else.

And it takes very little practice on even a basic keyboard to outpace a mobile "keyboard"'s input rate.

Also, good job and congrats on learning to type well!

Just to be clear: that typo (marks instead of myself) was made on an iphone onscreen keyboard, not touch typing in colemak ;-)

Or put an empty pillowcase on top of your hands.

When I first tried to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout, I popped the key caps off an old keyboard, and rearranged them to match Dvorak, then wrote a kernel driver that allowed me to have one Dvorak and on QWERTY keyboard plugged in at the same time. It worked much better when I just switched keyboard mappings without rearranged key caps and IM'd friends for a few days. The pressure to keep up with conversations is good motivation.

Normal OEM profile keycaps are not all equally shaped. The heights are meant to be staggered. You'd want something like DSA profile, blank or not, if you're planning to change stuff around.

Is forcing oneself to just look at the screen so difficult now?

To me, buying blank caps smells like consumerism under a self-improvement disguise.

At a company I worked for, there was a security policy that if you left your machine unlocked, someone could send an email on your behalf offering to buy the entire company donuts. You were expected to make good on the offer.

The only person immune to this was a Dvorak user (who I believe also had the additional security layer of using Emacs as a mail client).

Reminds me of a police case from my hometown where a car thief stole some kind of sports car, can't remember whether it was a Corvette or similar, but then got promptly caught because he couldn't drive a stick shift and kept stalling.

I've heard a war story about someone being able to consistently enter their password when standing up but never while sitting down. In the end, it turned out to be a QWERTY vs. QWERTZ thing: standing up, they'd look at the keycaps, but sitting down they'd touch type.

(if Rocky Balboa had been rated on WPM instead of KOs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugcwp1g9Bao )

Author here. If you start noticing, there are a lot of devs typing casually.

r/gatekeeping

>I write ~70wps with this technique

70 words per second?

I do the same thing typing "really". I also do things like use my middle and ring finger on my right to type something like "pop".

How long did it take you to learn dvorak?

Don't learn new layouts unless you realize all the consequences – you'll become unable to use anything but your very own customized setup effectively. I'm dead serious. I once had to do a password reset to a user who could not type the password on a QWERTY layout login screen after they set it on a Dvorak layout before rebooting.

Right? I've also had multiple co-workers (programmers!!) who do not use any keyboard shortcuts. Drives me crazy.

That's not true, my blank keycap HHKB has those keys as expected

yeah, i do the same, i don't look at the keyboard, but i definitely don't properly touch type.

I do ~80 wpm with my system, and around ~30wpm when properly touch typing. So I'm always annoyed by my slow typing when touch typing and usually give up trying to learn it. And yes I know, learning it properly would probably make me faster than my ~80 wpm because I'd actually utilize all my fingers, but going down again first feels so bad.

I have black keycaps with very faint grey letters on the front (not top). It gives the same aesthetic but if I ever forget a punctuation I can tilt my gaze a bit lower and find it.

PBT keycaps don't have this problem, although if you don't already have a mechanical keyboard, it'd be a bit of an investment.

The sysadmin at my company is notoriously terrible at written communication, especially his code. He uses unintelligible variable names; sometimes it's so bad you would think you're looking at minified code. When I was lamenting about reading his code to the senior dev he told me, "Oh yeah, sysadmin is a two finger typist". Ever since then I've correlated his code issues with his typing styles. One time over some after work beers he was criticizing the touch typing classes he was forced to take in college, saying it did not improve his wpm and he quickly resumed his own style. Now that we're in quarantine and most of our communication is written, I think about him facing head down toward his keyboard rapidly two-finger-striking away while I stare at the "now typing" bubble next to his name in chat.

Thanks.