Learning to Touch Type Again

Also recommended: typelit.io, where you type books out.

For a small subscription you can upload your own books, convenient for bookclub/typing practice killing-two-birds efforts.

https://www.typelit.io/

I'm entering this phase of what I'll call "general purpose use" where instead of building the muscle memory for specific "words" and phrases, I'm able to just conjure "words" and phrases in whatever order I want. Reminds me of the jump from Mavis Beacon to actually typing up school reports and whatnot.

I don't think I type much faster than I did before switching (maybe from like 80 WPM to 90 WPM), but I feel much more comfortable typing as fast as I can for much longer.

I also really liked vimperator, the firefox plugin that let you manipulate firefox and click links through the keyboard and scroll with vim bindings.

My tastes have completely changed. I no longer want to optimise how I do the work that I do do, but innovate or learn brand new things.

Switching machines is painful and jarring when you swap from a custom configured machine to a default configuration machine. So things like keybindings, tmux bindings, zsh customisations, ssh shortcuts. I just decided to remember how to use -W so I wasn't dependent on ssh shortcuts.

I am just keenly aware that the profit I get from tweaking everything has diminishing returns. I would rather spend that time learning a new algorithm or playing with some code on repl.it.

There is a case for avoiding syntax highlighting too, learn how to setup a codebase from scratch, not use autocomplete so you really learn how to read and write code. Those I agree with.

I use a trackball out of inertia.

Please note this comment is NOT against tweaking or optimising, it's just I think it's fine to not want to do certain things. I don't think it's obviously superior or worse, it's just not for me.

I learned touch typing on a manual typewriter using Gregg book[0] (summer school prior to freshman year of high school), and seem to recall that the official WPM test involved something like 5 minutes of transcribing a provided text, and nothing you typed after the fifth error counted at all. So obviously a much stricter standard. My best at the end of the class was something like 42 WPM, and I haven't tested it since then, but I do think I'm pretty fast and with good accuracy.

The errors mattered a lot more on a manual typewriter due to time needed to correct (or start over). And of course most typing nowadays is probably to generate original content rather than to transcribe an existing text.

[0]https://archive.org/details/greggtyping191se00rowe/page/n9/m...

I grew up typing Qwerty using only four fingers for typing letters, and my right-hand thumb for pressing the space bar. I could type pretty fast, which was especially useful for having heated discussions on irc. My typing speed also got me a job offer during the first dot com bubble.

At around 20, I switched to Dvorak, because I learned about the silly history of the Qwerty layout, and how Dvorak would result in more typing in less time. Over a period of two weeks, I worked my way up from the Beavis and Butthead lessons (uuuu hhhh ...) up to using all ten fingers (apart from the thumb on my left-hand, which isn't doing much apart from the occasional Alt or Super here and there.)

In this training period I suffered from terrible headaches. In retrospect, I think the main pathways in my brain connected my thoughts directly to the Qwerty layout, and this needed a complete rewiring. Also, during this period I could not respond quickly to people on irc who were obviously wrong about something. The frustration was enormous.

Eventually, my typing speed on TypeRacer plateaued somewhere at around 100 wpm. That's a lot less than Sean Wrona, but still requires you to perform a test to check if you didn't cheat.

Switching from Qwerty to Dvorak was really hard, especially in the beginning. It took about five years before I could work on somebody else's machine. I'm also hardwired to Emacs key bindings, so that's a limiting factor as well. Also, I can't seem to type Dvorak with only one finger, when I'm eating a snack for instance. This is still possible with Qwerty! And I can recite the entire Qwerty layout in a pub at night, but I require a keyboard to say aoeui.

In my early days of Dvorak, I wrote some utilities that calculated the travel distance that my fingers would make if I were to retype the entire bible. Depending on how you looked at it, Dvorak required about 5 to 30% less finger movement. Unfortunately, when you put in the Linux source tree, with numbers, curly braces, and other symbols, the advantage isn't so big.

What I do notice though, after ~20 years of Dvorak, is that it feels much more fluent than what I observe at my Qwerty typing coworkers. I guess what _really_ helped for lowering the risk of wrist problems, though, is to remap Caps Lock to an additional Control, and using C-p, C-n, C-b, C-f for keyboard navigation and C-h for backspace. Switching from keyboard to mouse and back really annoys me.

I do OK on splits, except for tending to reach for "b" with my right hand. I've mostly corrected that as I've used them more. They certainly help with wrists and shoulders, especially being able to tent, and take the least retraining per ergonomic benefit.

I haven't tried an ortholinear/columnar, it's somewhere on the list.

I can not get myself fully acclimated to a non-qwerty layout, whether mechanically conventional or not, its just too deep in my hands. I've been making an occasional pass at dvorak since the mid 2000s, and somewhat more frequent and dedicated attempts to get a BAT/Spiffchorder style chorder (specifically a left handed one) into my fingers for the last decade or so, and I always end up sore and slow because I start to twitch toward the qwerty motion before making the right one for the other design. It doesn't help that they're unusual enough that there aren't (AFIK) any good tutor programs suited to the progression on that style of chorder. Better every time I try, but never quite good enough for real work.

I suspect a certain degree of limited benefit using something unusual, in the same way using a non-bash shell increases friction with the rest of the universe.

I remember practicing for an hour a day, it is fun after you nail the first 4 letters so don’t give up too early.

Now I am using a Corne v3 which I built myself and I am considering investing more time switching to another keyboard layout like dvorak or colemark, can anyone recommend it? Was it worth it?

An advantage to doing things this way is reducing hand movement/stretching.

Another advantage to that technique is it'd work with pretty much any keyboard. (Even keyboards which have large spacebars).

Patient: “Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this.”

Doctor: “Then don’t do that!”

Perhaps it would be a good idea to reduce typing in general?

We’ve got voice input that’s getting much better.

We had this a decade ago:

https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI

Some sort of gesture based input? AR/VR has helped improve this?

Hopefully a combination of keyboard, voice, and gestures could reduce RSI issues.

But you'd be surprised how many people use the wrong hand for the keys near the middle. You can tell every time someone messes up when they stab the big empty space and it makes a loud "thunk". :)

I found both monkey type and keybr to be super helpful.

What's it like to be able to type in Dvorak or Coleman or any other layout? Is it like being bilingual. If I ever put the effort into learning something else, it's whenever I get a split keyboard.

When it had dried, I realized I didn't know where everything was. But, being a kid with no money, I figured it out. Now I'm typing exclusively on blank keyboards. WASD makes some nice ones.

I used to use qwerty, typed over half the letters with my left hand, very non-proper technique, but I was quite fast (160wpm is the best I recall getting). I had occasional left hand pain, so at one point I changed to Dvorak. Fast forward a year or two and I've been getting right hand pain which seemed worse than the old pain. I built a Pinky4 split ergonomic keyboard (columnar stagger). I loved the keyboard, but a month or two in, my pain wasn't really solved. I decided to learn Workman because of that. I'd considered some others like QGMLWB or Halmak, but Workman was pretty unique in that it has 50/50 hand usage, while qwerty is left-biased and dvorak is right-biased (the others have a bias as well). My hand pain is gone now and I'm extremely happy with both Workman and the Pinky4. I configured my layout in the QMK firmware, so I can plug my keyboard into whatever and not have to tweak OS settings (assuming the computer is set to qwerty).

I would recommend both an ergonomic keyboard and the Workman layout, but if you only went with one, changing to Workman may have the bigger impact. I would recommend full immersion and not running away back to your preferred layout. This ensures fast progression and constant progress, though it's frustrating at the start for sure.

I use Workman on my phone as well with AnySoftKeyboard. Many people say this is ridiculous, but I just don't want to look at or use qwerty anywhere if possible. Also, I didn't make the layout available, it was already there or I wouldn't have bothered probably. I did the same with dvorak previously.

The benefit to these keyboards is they have a more traditional layout. This makes it easier to move to different keyboards. While the 360 is really nice, it also means you have to learn a new way of typing that doesn't map well enough to more traditional keyboards.

My wrists don't hurt since using the split keyboard, and find that using the split during the day is enough where when I do use a non-split keyboard, I'm fine.

Ironically, I am now very slow to work with normal keyboards.

Like shouldn't this be an epidemic?

not counting wpm etc, don't want bloat.

my focus is practicing accuracy on difficult pieces like 4567, $%^& etc