How to Type 3x Faster
barehands.substack.com
barehands.substack.com
There's a special type of keyboard called steno that takes this further. Instead of typing out individual letters, your keyboard has about 20 keys, and you use "chords" of keys to type entire syllables at a time. Experts can reach upwards of 300 wpm. Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7AFutd9Gos. I tried to do this but it took too much time to learn.
I actually made myself do that ~5 years ago (to colemak). Ultimately I am not sure if it was worth the effort, but I can tell you that I type at least 40% faster (tested), and typing < 100wpm is a 'bad day'.
Ultimately does it matter? Maybe on slack, but not while I'm coding. To me, learning my editor well (Vim) is where I got my 40% from while coding.
For coding, no. If your typing speed is your bottleneck, you're doing something wrong — either don't use your abstractions the right way and write too much code, or don't know your editor macro engine well enough. Probably both.
But for writing prose? Yes. Being able to type faster gives you more freedom to test more ideas, get more rough material and then edit it out.
If you're coding at >40wpm sustained, you're basically vomiting out code without a care in the world.
I could see people getting into trouble if they can't manage 30 wpm typing speed, which seems to disagree with what I just said, but coding often comes in little microbursts, and if it takes you too long to get an idea down, you might get distracted by something else and forget what the next step is. I believe there's a law of diminishing returns there, where going from 7 seconds to 6 has a bigger payoff than going from 4 to 3.
Does it work as well for non-native speakers though?
https://hackaday.com/2020/03/31/perhaps-august-dvorak-is-mor...
Probably needs to be clarified. There are even subsets of "papaya" that can be typed with one hand! e.g. "pay", "yap", "papa".
Lots of 5 letter words. pupae, poppy, puppy, queue, popup...
In the end we'll likely never know unless we find some new notes.
http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/publications/PreQ...
Over time my typing became fast and reliable enough that it just doesn't need to be any faster. It's as fast as I can think.
Shortcuts slow me down because they don't fit naturally. They cause a hiccup in the brain. A little pause when you think of the right shortcut to use. So I never invested in shortcuts.
But take my ZSH history away and it's like chopping off an arm. Maybe that counts as having a bazillion shortcuts.
Other things that come to mind are..
+ How would this affect your writing style? How would it affect your vocabulary?
+ If well done, I can see this having a positive impact around purposefully changing the way you write, by making shortcuts for the kinds of words you want to be using vs not using.
+ It is almost like creating another language as a translation/input layer. Could we agree on a mapping for the majority of English words to make this something worth learning? Something that could become common place?
Unfortunately, both Vim and Dvorak pre-date typical copy (Ctrl+C), cut (Ctrl+X), paste (Ctrl+V). It's not the typing, but these inconveniences that make me think of going with some Colemak variant. Even though both of Vim and Dvorak pre-date dedicated arrow keys, HJKL on Dvorak is still saner than any Colemak layout I've seen so far. I dream about some alternative that strikes a good balance between all of these.
[0] https://github.com/1MachineElf/qmk_firmware/tree/sb4dv_planc...
I can also add Ctrl keys on the bottom row. The point of SB4DV is for it to work on anything with as few as 33 keys. Adapting it to a 48-key Planck leaves room for extra keys such as these, while the core is the same across different keyboards.
However, I do find it somewhat annoying still because often my shortcuts clash with the words that start with the same characters.
I guess the lesson for me is to pick better shortcuts.
Need to make a tool that would check if a given shortcut will collide with a dictionary word.
My worst offender is “atm”, which expands to “at the moment”, but sometimes I need to find an ATM to withdraw some cash :)
Edited for formatting because mobile is awesome!
(I'm still fast with qwerty, surprisingly, skill doesn't deteriorate. I guess it works like speaking languages, you can be fluent in more than one)
"The stenotype keyboard has far fewer keys than a conventional alphanumeric keyboard. Multiple keys are pressed simultaneously (known as "chording" or "stroking") to spell out whole syllables, words, and phrases with a single hand motion. This system makes real-time transcription practical for court reporting and live closed captioning. Because the keyboard does not contain all the letters of the English alphabet, letter combinations are substituted for the missing letters. There are several schools of thought on how to record various sounds, such as the StenEd, Phoenix, and Magnum Steno theories."
I don't love how much I lean into autocorrect to speed up my typing but maybe I'd feel better about it if it was even more intentional.
I love the shortcuts that force them into the growth and reflection mindsets and I love the questions at the end of the article - better than a tldr.
Dont = Don’t
rr = remember
wd = would be
etc.
:ab hn Hey there hackernews!