Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

I did not get any touch-typing lesson as a kid (the Amiga 500 keyboard felt so massive...), so I developed a pretty fast 6-finger technique that helped me into my early 30s - I was considered a very quick typists in chats and the likes, but writing code was still error-prone. At one point I saw a colleague touch-typing properly, and I felt so envious that I decided to do something about it. I started doing lessons but somehow always ended up peeking. Eventually, 5 years ago, I moved to COLEMAK, and that forced me to learn proper form. I can now push 60 to 80 wpm on regular text with no effort.

I still struggle somewhat with special characters, because of my short pinkies. I am currently experimenting with alternatives (see http://blog.pythonaro.com/2020/06/better-access-to-special-c... ) but I've never been good at layer-switching and it makes me still pretty slow.

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.

It's off course hard to find the average typing speed of everybody who types, but Wikipedia says this:

> An average professional typist types usually in speeds of 50 to 80 wpm, while some positions can require 80 to 95 (usually the minimum required for dispatch positions and other time-sensitive typing jobs), and some advanced typists work at speeds above 120 wpm.[4] Two-finger typists, sometimes also referred to as "hunt and peck" typists, commonly reach sustained speeds of about 37 wpm for memorized text and 27 wpm when copying text, but in bursts may be able to reach much higher speeds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute

Huh. I type at 100 wpm and am the slowest of a group of a few friends, the others can do 120-130 wpm. I guess that skewed my perception.

You and your friends are probably programmers (or similar) and have been touch typing for decades. It's always easy to forget the selection bias of self-organizing groups.

Until recently, the best Typeracer class was 55+. They now added another one at 80. Most people I know (largely “normies”, not geeks) struggle to reach speeds above 40.

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