Learn touch typing – it's worth it | Hacker News Reader

Learn touch typing – it's worth it

typequicker.com

66 pointsabsoluteunit1101 comments

I switched to Dvorak twice. Once in high school because I thought it would be fun, but I bought a labelled keyboard cover and never really learnt it.

The second time, 5 years into my career, I did it for health reasons, and my hands hurt much less as a result. This time though I didn’t get any keyboard covers, didn’t have a relabelled keyboard, and didn’t learn the key mapping. I used an onscreen reference only, and phased it out after a few days. I switched cold-turkey on day one of a Christmas break, made sure to do some practice each day, and 2.5 weeks later when I went back to work I was touch typing Dvorak, albeit slowly.

Nowadays I type fast and get nothing out of looking at the keyboard. I normally use blank or QWERTY labels. And it’s great.

I don’t think I could have taught myself touch typing on QWERTY because I was already too ingrained with bad habits, but switching layout was a great opportunity to start from scratch and get it right.

> I don’t think I could have taught myself touch typing on QWERTY because I was already too ingrained with bad habits

It is possible to learn touch typing on a layout where you have already developed bad practices. That's what I did on Qwerty. There will initially be a tendency to switch back to the hunt-and-peck method, since you're not yet fully comfortable with touch typing. This can be curtailed by forcing yourself from looking at the keyboard. It's nearly impossible to hunt-and-peck without looking at the keyboard occasionally. However, that tendency will eventually disappear as you become comfortable with touch typing, as it's the easier style among the two.

I share the same views as the parent comment, but I also agree with you there could be a strong case for touch typing with QWERTY. There's probably a lot to be gained by switching to a blank keyboard in general, QWERTY or not.

Fellow Dvorakist here. I totally agree that touch typing is the way to go when learning it. Labels just hold you back and you get so much more from learning to touch type.

I also agree with your point about touch typing QWERTY. I'd even bet that learning to touch type any non-QWERTY keyboard layout, even if it's less efficient than QWERTY, is beneficial purely because it erases bad habits ingrained over time from undisciplined typing. Blank keycaps are the a true meta.

Touch typing is a very underrated skill. Few people feel the need to learn it. But it's immediately useful. The keyboard simply disappears from your mind, sparing your entire attention for the task at hand and increasing your productivity noticeably. It reduces the strain on your eyes too. Even allows you to close your eyes in between long typing sessions.

Learning the first layout is a bit hard and may take upto a month. Subsequent layouts are easier to learn. And you can use the same keyboard for all those layouts. I can handle US Qwerty and my native language effortlessly now. Now considering Colemak-DH. Touch typing is something I feel every programmer, writer, journalist, documenter and secretary must learn.

It's a skill that should be taught in school. Computers (and the Internet) are so important in our lives, why would we not want to lower the barrier between using them?

Computers definitely do not seem that important for young people of today. They can get quite far by using phone with a few apps (social media, browser, etc.) Not that I think this is a good thing, but simply my observation.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "quite far"

Regardless of what they choose to use for their leisure time, computers will still be important in school and likely at work in the future. Not to mention that many young people still use computers regularly for leisure (gaming, chatting, etc)

In any case, learning touch typing would still translate somewhat to typing on a phone - certainly things are different, but getting used to where the letters are still helps.

They’re not important to (most) young people today for the same reasons health insurance plans aren’t important to young people today: they just haven’t reached the professional world yet. Once they get there, computers suddenly become very important.

Many people who are not tech enthusiasts will be interacting with a computer for at least 40 hours a week or more for nearly half of their lives. If you used any other tool that much, you’d want to get really good at using it. Why shouldn’t the same hold for computers today?

> Few people feel the need to learn it.

Is this true? Almost every educated adult under age ~45 that I encounter touch types. Certainly in the white-collar/tech professional sphere.

There is definitely a generational divide where it becomes far less common with those who did not grow up with ubiquitous computer usage.

I find that most Americans can touch type, but most Danes can’t. I’m Denmark touch typing used to be taught in schools as a voluntary subject, but it mostly appealed to girls who wanted to become secretaries and was eventually abandoned due to lack of interest. Nowadays the only way to learn is through online tools like Typing Club, but last time I checked it didn’t support the Danish keyboard layout. I personally used gtypist on Linux, spent a week on rote learning, best invest of time in many career.

I'm American and would disagree that most of us know how to touch type.

The average American definitely doesn't touch type. The average american types ~40wpm, so yeah.

40 wpm is about 4 characters a second, which is pretty good for 2-fingered typing - and phenomenal for hunt&peck.

I'd say that average includes a large, probably majority, of touch-typists.

There’s an incoming cohort of people who only ever used a touch screen to type and a physical keyboard is a new thing. They do things like activate caps lock, type a single capital letter, then deactivate caps lock, because that’s how a phone keyboard does it. There’s also the reliance on autocomplete, auto spellcheck, auto capitalization, auto punctuation, etc.

We’re quickly moving to where using a physical keyboard is going to be a skill that needs to be actively taught/learned. People aren’t getting that type of incidental exposure anymore.

Huh, I'm 39 and I really hadn't thought about this incoming generation of people not used to typing.

Agree. I wish the school system wouldn't ignore it as it does in many places.

Even with touch devices, to gain productivity, i see people to switch to keyboard input because pen or touch aren't fast enough and voice typing isn't possible for example in auditoriums.

But, don't learn to type quicker, learn to type precisely. Speed will come.

The trigger for me to start practicing touch typing was when I saw a classmate trying to log into her Gmail on a classroom PC. I was shocked at how fast she did it. I started with 10FastFingers and keybr, then stick with monkeytype and typeracer. Not sure if it's made me more productive, but it feels good when your fingers can keep up with your thoughts.

For folks who want to learn typing, I recommend Jashe's Typing Guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L-P68VDSGlpLM5A9tfRvWFoh...

Similar to me! In my case it was a YouTubers/Twitch streamers like Prime and others that typed so fast...I wanted that for myself.

Thanks for sharing - seems like a very detailed guide and something down my alley :)

Wait, how common is it to not know touch typing?

Honest question, maybe a blind spot of mine. Touch typing is so integrated into my daily experience it feels like driving or riding a bike. I mostly learned to touch type in the 90s just chatting with friends on AOL instant messenger. I think of touch typing as something nearly everyone picks up just as a side effect of living with computers.

Chatting nowadays happens with thumbs.

Even in previous generations, most self-taught people get fast at hunt&peck rather than learning proper touch-typing. It is not a natural skill in any way, you need a conscious effort to stop looking and to limit your main fingers wandering.

I generally tried to keep my kids away from excessive screen usage, but I motivated them to touch-type anyway, because I always wished I'd learned it earlier than I did (in my early 30s). I see them reaping benefits already in their teenage years, knocking out school assignments very quickly and being able to focus on the content more than the typing.

I'm also confused by this. I taught myself touch typing in the 90's. I also had a required semester-long class that covered only typing my freshman year of high school (1999). Neither of my parents learned it, but I figured everyone younger than me knew how. Pretty shocking to find out that's not the case.

I can't imagine not being able to touch-type. It's such second-nature that I can hold a conversation with someone while typing out separate thoughts I'm having about the conversation on a keyboard.

The average American types around 40wpm, so definitely not touch typing. People definitely get by without learning it.

I work in a huge variety of fields and interact with people from all places in US society. My guess would be maybe 25-35% of people I've worked with use touch typing. Everyone chicken pecks.

Most people use phones nowadays and rarely use a physical keyboard. It just isn't that important to most people. They can get by without it.

Honestly I'm consistently surprised - I've worked at Amazon and seen many engineers, product people, etc type with incorrect techniques.

I've seen interns looking for symbols on their keyboard for a second or two (the tilde "~" or the pipe symbols "|") when I asked them to type in a certain shell command.

Since I started building this website, many of my friends and family learned touch typing because of the site never even heard of proper touch typing technique until I started talking about what I was working on.

I think it's due to poor education - there's no institutionalized course that teaches this. A couple schools maybe, but nothing on a big scale.

Kind of mind boggling given that almost every desk job uses a keyboard

Yeah this is mind boggling to me as a millennial. I didn't set out to learn touch typing either. Hell, my sister who isn't a techie learned to do it just be spending all afternoon on LiveJournal and AIM chat. I don't understand how one could be an avant reader of hn and be interested in an article about this like... you don't? You can't? Whaaaa?

It's pretty difficult to pick it up naturally when you only use a touchscreen and never a keyboard, since there aren't any physical keys to stabilize your hand position. It's becoming more common for people to only use their phones or tablet and not a desktop or laptop.

I somehow managed to get through over a decade as a programmer before deciding to actually learn how to touch type. I was stuck at about 60 wpm with the wrong fingering, decided to invest in learning the right approach and dropped down to 30 wpm for a while, but eventually ended up at 120 wpm after a year or so. I can't overstate how much it's changed my ability to write software. Not having to think the literal characters I'm entering and instead just watching words and symbols appear on the screen at the speed of thought makes the whole experience significantly more enjoyable. Combined with getting good at the Vim keybindings which I did around the same time, it makes programming feel like a video game. Can't recommend highly enough. I used monkeytype.com for the most part.

> I can't overstate how much it's changed my ability to write software. Not having to think the literal characters I'm entering and instead just watching words and symbols appear on the screen at the speed of thought makes the whole experience significantly more enjoyable.

Literally my experience summarized perfectly in two sentences!

> I used monkeytype.com for the most part.

I used it for a bit too but found typing random words kind of boring - I wanted more pre-existing variety without having to always add custom texts which is why I built https://www.typequicker.com/practice and added the topics mode.

MonkeyType is a really great site though - the community they've built is incredible

> Combined with getting good at the Vim keybindings which I did around the same time, it makes programming feel like a video game.

Omg, exactly this lol. When I was at my last job, some of the most boring tasks were fun because I was gamifiying with vim - without being able to type fast, I would have been miserable doing these types of tickets

can you describe in more detail how you did the gamifying with vim?

Ah for work?

I didn't do anything explicitly - it was more like mental game. e.g.: "How can I do this X task with macros?" or "I'm going to try to use a macro across a quicklist of locations", etc

This is what I meant

ah, so you basically challenge yourself to learn a new vim trick to solve a particular editing problem. ok, that's a goo idea.

I did enough computer stuff before kindergarten that I could type very quickly without looking at the keyboard or thought. I did hunt and peck initially, but as I used a computer more it just got faster. When I think of any character I immediately know where on the keyboard it is. This is even if I can't see the keyboard, since the layout of any local area is uncommon enough to quickly and automatically orient. My kindergarten had a class where they wanted to teach touch typing. They did it via an automatic program where it'd explain some concept, then have you type some sequences to practice it. I decided to give this strategy (with the home row, feeling the bumps, etc.) a chance. I was quite a bit slower with it. Eventually, I got frustrated with the slow progress and just sped through typing each sequence in the way that I knew how. I finished a few month course in like 30 minutes. Today I type the fastest out of anyone whom I know, beating many people who use traditional touch typing methods.

From this anecdote, I hope to show that it is possible to learn to type well with general keyboard use. Note that this is the very skill where it's useful. So, I posit: touch typing doesn't need to be taught because the people who use a keyboard enough to benefit from it will learn something better automatically.

> So, I posit: touch typing doesn't need to be taught because the people who use a keyboard enough to benefit from it will learn something better automatically.

This is a pretty poor argument that can be applied to practically any skill. "Why should we teach people in a structured way? They can just learn it by doing it!"

For many people, having a structure to learn from is extremely helpful, even if they do diverge from it to learn in their own way.

Also I don't think we should focus solely on "people who will benefit from it" - presumably you're talking about people whose livelihoods depend directly on typing efficiently. What about those who only use it casually but still want to communicate effectively?

I learned to read before kindergarten by having my parents read to me (but not, they say, attempting to teach me). Therefore reading doesn't need to be taught because people exposed to books enough will learn it automatically?

No, not all skills are conducive to learning by exposure. I do think that we should emphacize what the specific person could actively use more than we do, though.

You extrapolate from N=1 to N=8 billion.

I've been messing with keybr daily for a while now and have retrained myself to do things more properly but two things about doing everything the "right" way bother me:

1. Too many keys on the right pinky - all punctuation except for `!`, `,`, `.`, plus backspace and return.

2. Opposite modifier keys rule - I just can't retrain myself for this one especially since it's a yet another key for the right pinky. I always end up only using the keys on the left side.

Not sure how to best fix those.

Like many above, I learned on a split keyboard. If you are committed to touch typing and the 2 points you mentioned bother you, I highly suggest a split keyboard. The placement for backspace and return being on your thumbs is so common-sense that it feels stupid to have it any other way.

Being able to use thumbs for anything besides the spacebar would be great. Any keyboard recommendations for beginners?

I've been using an ErgoDox EZ for years and can highly recommend it - but basically anything QMK powered is a great idea.

I balled out and got a Glove80 btw. No regrets

For me, using a keyboard with more keys around the thumbs and configurable keymaps with layers solves this. I have space, return and esc all easily accessible on my thumbs and my most used punctuation across the easily reached keys (such as home row) on a layer, also activated with my thumb.

fwiw I use a moonlander but many keyboards could work equally well I'm sure

Qwerty is top-row heavy. In my experience, a natural fast typer will naturally lean away from home row "touch typing" to a top-middle row hover style of typing. You have to use an alternate layout to really grasp what home row typing should be. Also, Z (and similar for the whole left bottom row) should be pressed with the ring finger. I'm really curious why anyone would use the pinky there, unless your hand is angled to the left.

I struggled for years with touch-typing on QWERTY. I remember the "hovering" action that you described.

After switching to Dvorak, within months, I naturally began touch-typing. I suspect it is due to it being home-row-heavy, with all vowels on the left and most common consonants on the right.

Oh interesting!

I'm going to be adding additional keyboard layouts to https://www.typequicker.com/practice soon for the keyboard visualization. This might help people who are starting to learn it.

Dvorak seems to be mentioned frequently on this thread alone - I was surprised how many folks use this layout.

> a natural fast typer will naturally lean away from home row "touch typing" to a top-middle row hover style of typing

Yeah, I agree. I've noticed that some folks who reach 160wpm+ start to move off from the standard, "best practice" touch typing technique. With the hand guide visualization on https://www.typequicker.com I focused on just following the common "best practice" approach.

I should add a comment somewhere on the site that these are just the general recommended finger placements and not gospel.

Certain keys are just more comfortable with variation. I use an orth keyboard split keybaord as well so for me especially the Z key makes sense to type with pinky. On a standard qwerty keyboard, I've seen folks do both pinky and ring finger.

I don't think either the correct way - whatever variation of standard touch typing feels better and helps you type faster is the solution

What taught me to touch type was moving to a split keyboard. Using my old method was slow since my hands naturally wanted to press the keys on the other side. So I was basically "forced" to learn it.

Now it's second nature and I can't imagine how I did it before. I'm not too concerned about speed since I was plenty fast previously. I think I'm maybe 10% faster. But the difference in comfort is night and day.

How do you do on a normal keyboard?

Switching to a split keyboard also is what got me touch typing, but only on the split keyboard. The moment I revert back to a regular keyboard, I go back to my old typing habit, and even practicing to touch type on a regular keyboard quickly feels uncomfortable.

I had same issue and it’s ultimately what killed the Moonlander for me - I dedicated time to get better at touch typing (I already do it from years of chatting in games) and dialling in a layout that worked for how I use computers.

Only to find that I’m mostly using other people’s computers when they call me over to help, and suddenly I’m mashing my meaty paws all over their MacBook as they look on in horror that this supposed technical professional can’t even press the shift key reliably.

If you have this issue, I can highly recommend working in another country where all your colleagues are using a different keyboard layout to you entirely. This is particularly bad for programming, because while standard layouts are mostly _fairly_ consistent with the letters, the symbols can end up anywhere. Sure, this means you still won't be able to find anything and look like an idiot, but now you can blame their keyboards for being weird rather than your own muscle memory!

Oh I moved to a split keyboard as well!!

This was my next big step in my typing journey.

Started with a crkbd/corne and now ended up with QMK modded Kinesis Advantage 2. I don't type as fast on the Kinesis due to deep keywells and just an insane amount of modded keys, but my hands thank me every day.

One other reason that led me down the path of correct typing and ergo keyboards was hand pain

I'm surprised that we are mentioning a paid site here and we are not mentioning tools like monkeytype and typeracer where you can do good practice for absolute free. In this particular space monkeytype is a super customizable tool that can fit tons of different people.

I signed up the site mentioned, most features are free and I like it. The biggest plus I see here compared to monkey or typeracer is that this site shows the hands and fingers visually. That makes it easier to follow and learn

Hey!

Thanks a lot for checking out the site - OP and creator here.

> That makes it easier to follow and learn

Yeah, that was my goal. It's pretty much what I used to learn as well.

I started this site ages and slowly added more and more features. I wanted to improve my coding skills while improving typing.

Primagaen always said to build what you want and use, so that's what I did haha

I will be adding many more features - I have a massive list! Thanks for the support. Any feedback is welcome: issues@typequicker.com

> I'm surprised that we are mentioning a paid site here and we are not mentioning tools like monkeytype and typeracer where you can do good practice for absolute free. In this particular space monkeytype is a super customizable tool that can fit tons of different people.

OP and site creator here.

Yeah I agree, monkeytype and typeracer are awesome! Huge fan and user of both.

I've just released this TypeQuicker app and I'm figuring out the best ways to monetize. I'm really hoping never run ads (I'm huge into anti-ad websites. I pay for things like Kagi for example, even though Google Search is free to use) which is why I'm settling for the freemium model (with some paid features).

For the record, everything the other sites you mentioned, I offer for free by the way :)

The paid features on https://www.typequicker.com/pricing are for AI powered, personalized learning. SmartPractice which analyses typing history and creates personalized, natural text focusing on user weakpoints, target practice to generate natural text based on certain sequences, etc.

Check out the video demo at the pricing page I added - I don't think any site offers this for free and that's all I'm charging for (I need to pay for the LLM API).

Let me know your thoughts! I'm really passionate about typing, keyboards, etc. I want to build the best typing platform and I want it to be valuable.

I learned with Typing of the Dead, its abandonware now and easy to find. Has lots of game modes and tutorials and is quite funny.

I self learned touch typing. I dont need to look at the keyboard for typing english. But I still struggle with special chars and the number row. Cant find anything good to help with that.

Hey - OP here.

I built https://www.typequicker.com/practice

I can suggest trying the custom mode and just practising the symbols alone - we have the keyboard and hand visualization to help with that so you don't have to look down on the keyboard.

When I just built the site (built it out of interest for myself to learn programming and have flexibility with whatever features I wanted), this is kind of what I did.

Whatever was a pain for me to type, I'd just paste it into the custom and practice that until I got comfortable

Great ! Thanks for building this and for sharing that nice tip. Side question, Do i have a way to find which keys i need to practice more on ?

Happy to help!

> Do i have a way to find which keys i need to practice more on ?

Right now, the best way is probably after finishing a session, in the stats section you can see the table of characters typed or in the "Keyboard" tab as well.

You can then see which were your slowest, had most mistypes, etc

And not only characters alone but also sequences (see "Bigrams" / "Trigrams" tab in the stats section) that you type slowly.

I personally found that practising specific sequences helped - epseically if they're a common sequence in English. I add an indicator to each sequence on how common it is in the English language.

For me for example, "c" -> "e" and "e" -> "c" was really slow. This is a very common sequence. So then practicing this in the Drills mode was my strategy

I type somewhat fast, so I labored for years under the impression that I already knew touch typing. But the reality is I didn't -- like I don't keep my fingers on the home row, and I make tons of mistakes that I mindlessly correct using Bksp.

I find keeping my fingers on the home row quite unnatural and prevents me from typing chords with Ctrl/Alt and Shift. How have folks overcome this?

I habe a virtual layer on my keyboard that contains all symbols I need regularly. Holding down a specific key (that is simple to reach) toggles the layer - like the normal Shift key.

Touch typing courses focus on writing English prose. Programming requires a far greater range of ability with all the punctuation and special symbols. Then you have all the function and special keys too.

I wouldn't be too hung up on how it is taught. Once you learn the essentials and can type a sentence or so without looking, then you'll be fine. Personally, I just watch the screen and correct and make slight hand position adjustments without looking down at the keyboard. The fun trick is when somebody walks up to my desk to ask a question, and I continue typing whilst engaging in their conversation. It is sort of a file-write-flush for me, to capture whatever was on my mind when I was interrupted.

> Ctrl/Alt and Shift. How have folks overcome this?

ctrl and shift heavy flows are a remnant from ibmpc / windows era and suck for ergonomics, unfortunately. Most people realise just how much more comfortable cmd+ is from using a mac. You're holding the thumb there anyway, might as well make use of it.

I'm in the exact same situation.

I can type around 60-70 wpm with non touch typing. Same as you, often have to correct things with Backspace.

I rarely use my pinky. But with touch typing I have to use it more and it feels very unnatural.

When I have to bang out emails or any other form of text for work, I can't see myself slowing down to force sticking on the home row to learn touch typing.

I can practice in the evening. But then you essentially keep using the 'bad' way of typing while also learning the good way. Seems confusing.

I learnt touch typing with KDE's Ktouch (a touch typing tutor program), which has auto-generated courses for various layouts but also has a manually laid-out course for Dvorak. It really made me appreciate how well Dvorak works for learning TT, because when a Qwerty course has me just typing out sdfjkl nonsensical gibberish, the Dvorak course had me typing silly but memorable stuff like 'none hunt out the one ton nun'. And yeah, just having actual words to type from lesson 2 on really made me feel a sense of progression which gave me the motivation to power on through it even when I started running into the limits of my dexterity.

Now that I can touch type, though, I'm actually kinda interested in stenography. I wonder whether that can be as much of a force multiplier as touch typing.

EDIT: shout out to typelit as well, I discovered it here on HN (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34193504>) and it's awesome.

Stenography is very different and limited - it's something like, you hit all the keys for a word at once and it's interpreted from left to right on the keyboard when you release them. So you're typing in a phonetic shorthand instead of full words, and stenography keyboards have some duplicate letters to support the left-to-right ordering when multiple are needed in a word.

It can definitely be faster when typing English (court reporters do this to keep up with everyone's speaking speed), but I expect you'd need something new for other domains like programming.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really see the advantage myself for touch typing. My current style of typing already reaches me 110+wpm, and it feels natural without any wrist problems, and I also can type fine without looking at the keyboard. (Perhaps the lack of wrist problems part is because of young age, but I’ve been typing for over 10 years)

When I tried out Dvorak, I learned touch typing for Dvorak, but after a while, it started hurting from having my hands in the touch typing position, so I decided it wasn’t really worth it to continue, since the point would’ve been to reduce injury.

The way that I type is a combination of knowing where keys are, having a muscle memory of common words, and knowing how to effectively flow between them.

It seems to me though that many of the advantages of touch typing, I already have gotten without it, so it doesn’t seem to be worth it?

Agreed, Touch Typing is probably worse than what you develop naturally once you get to the 100+ WPM mark. I guess Touch Typing is just the simplest, easiest method to codify and teach.

> and I also can type fine without looking at the keyboard.

You are touch typing. You're just not home-row touch-typing.

I don't do it that way either, developed my own style playing multiplayer StarCraft in the late 90s/early 2000s. Home row has always felt awkward, I have small hands and have to twist my wrists to reach keys when trying it. Instead my hands mostly hover with fingertips constantly in contact, and I'm using my elbows and shoulders for coarse movements across the keyboard. I have occasionally gotten comments about how weird it looks, from people who only know home-row touch-typing.

It's just that home-row is usually the only thing taught so most people think it's the only style of touch typing.

Same for me. Huh, I'd never corrolated that with hand size, but that's plausible.

For me, I took piano lessons long before I ever touched a typewriter or computer keyboard. With piano, you have to move your entire hand to get to where the keys physically are. I guess it never occurred to me to keep my hands in one place on a computer keyboard.

I think this is one of those things that's way easier if you start early. Not sure if schools still have typing classes now. I vaguely remember mine in the 90s, but I didn't really get fast until I started playing MUDs and typing was a matter of life and death!

Now that I think of it, they were also really helpful for learning how to scan a wall of console text and look for the useful bits, and also realizing the value of configuring shortcuts and syntax highlighting. I see someone already had the idea of using a text adventure to learn Bash: https://gitlab.com/slackermedia/bashcrawl

I also had typing classes in the 90s which I believe helped but I was also eager to learn how as I didn't have a computer at home, so any chance to get my hands on a typewriter or computer.

I believe my touch typing speed come about with instant messaging applications such as AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, or chatting in mIRC. I felt the need to type as fast as possible to be able to stay in the conversation with many users or to keep conversation moving as naturally as speaking speed.

> Not sure if schools still have typing classes now

They don't!

My high school nor elementary school didn't have it - even though we literally had a computer class. It was never even mentioned.

Most universities don't have it. It's mind blowing - it's such a common activity across every desk job and yet no one is teaching it.

While I can definitely see the ability to type faster as an advantage in some cases, I don't think I'll ever bother going through the process of learning it. From decades of software development I can type fast enough for whatever it is I need without looking at the keyboard and not once have I felt that the bottleneck of my productivity is the the speed that I type. Most of the time goes into thinking how to do it right so that it doesn't have to be done again... And with code generation becoming better all the time, I believe the abstraction layers were one will have to spend more time on will get even higher.

It changes how you think and put thoughts down. It's definitely a skill worth learning.

Once someone can type above ~120wpm the keyboard disappears from your brain.

That's a bit like saying, "I have a bicycle. I've never not been able to get where I need to go. Why would I need a car?"

The correct analogy to me is that being able to run fast will not help you that much in building a rocket to take you to the moon. I'm open to changing my mind though if presented with a solid counter argument.

I was hoping it would speak to the second part more - why is it worth it?

I get the arguments in the abstract sense, you want the tool to be background, maximum focus spent in flow. But in my experience I’m rarely chugging out multiple WPM constant typing. This is as a software engineer coding on Python predominantly. Plus the advent of CoPilots along with autocomplete IDEs I am not even typing as much as before. Granted, I am spending less time looking at the keyboard because I have the key sequences imprinted in my head now, and that feels nice.

The blocker in flow is rarely the time I spend pecking out keys. So what am I missing, how much is it truly worth it?

How about when you have to communicate with people? I had a terrible handwriting as a child at school, and I liked how the girls' handwriting was often very neat, so one year I decided to reteach myself how to write.

My handwriting became neater, but much slower. I never recovered the speed, so this bit me in university. I used to joke that I never finish exams, so I make sure that everything I write is correct. I'd always do better than people who finished the whole exam.

I was introduced to computers late in life, at 16 in the early 2000s. When I got to university, typing was a struggle. One day I saw someone typing fast. I decided to learn.

I think for me, the biggest benefit is mostly when writing long messages, more than typing. Having most conversations async at work means fewer pauses between reading and replying.

It also sometimes looks silly watching someone play hide and seek with their keyboard, because I've met people who punch in a few jets, then go hunting for others as if they've moved position.

I've tried getting better at touch typing a few times. Interestingly, if I do so, I get pretty bad wrist/finger pain (rsi I guess?) so I've not stuck with it.

On a normal keyboard? I would recommend an ergonomic keyboard. I started off using one from Microsoft then got a Logitech K860 and have been using that at home and at work for over half a decade now. I'm never going back, in my opinion normal keyboards are strictly inferior.

It's worth a try if you're having trouble with pain, worked for me. And it isn't just good for health reasons, it's just better suited to human use. It feels more natural and comfortable.

> normal keyboards are strictly inferior.

Amen.

Had terrible pain in wrists. Switching keyboards, learning touch typing, learning to use just enough force when typing, etc helped with wrist pain so much

Same.

I am at about 70 wpm and I do semi-touch typing. I can type without looking at the keyboard 95% of the time (symbols etc. are tricky), but I don't use all 10 fingers (pinkies are pretty much unused) and do not rely on having my hands in the 'home' position.

Doing the 10 finger based home position approach almost immediately feels incredibly restricting. Some things like typing a C with my middle finger feel like I am doing something counter to my anatomy (when would you ever make such a movement naturally? let alone hundreds or thousand times a day?).

I wonder whether it is just a lack of getting used to it or whether people who do the full on touch typing a lot just fuck up their body regularly.

Hey - see my reply to the top comment on this thread about my experience with hand pain.

> I wonder whether it is just a lack of getting used to it or whether people who do the full on touch typing a lot just fuck up their body regularly.

For me it was a matter of getting used it and building up that finger dexterity. Mind you, I now use an ortho, split keyboard (Kinesis adanvatage 2 ) and touch typing on it, hitting "c" feels natural for me.

I can see how on other keyboards it may not be the case.

Touch typing "best practice" is after all just a general guideline. These things vary so much because everyone has different keyboards, different sized hands (different finger length).

My suggestion is to focus on not tensing up and using just enough force to trigger the key when typing. Starting from touch typing and then adjusting the technique to your own preferences over time.

I've seen typist who do 200wpm+ by a technique that they came up on their own based on touch typing.

> I get pretty bad wrist/finger pain (rsi I guess?)

First of all, I'm really sorry. Persistent rsi/hand pain was brutal and terrifying for me. I went through a heavy phase where I even considered having to quit my dream job at the time at a financial tech start-up.

I had a mentor (software dev) at this company who shared his story - and he had rsi and it flared up so bad at one point he said he took ~6months sabbatical to recover.

Treat it seriously and look for ways to improve if it's bothersome and gets worse.

Things that helped me:

- rest, breaks, stretching, drink water, frequently - less gaming (I played a lot of league of legends) - learning to type with correct force (often overlooked topic). Practice typing slowly and gently so that you're pressing keys just hard enough to trigger the switch. Mindful, typing practice. Don't focus on speed or accuracy - just the force - switching keyboards; I went through a huge phase of various keybaord (corne/crknbd, various other mechanical keyboards, different layouts) and finally settled on a QMK-modded Kinesis Advantage 2. It's expensive but worth it. My mentor that I mentioned had it too and he recommend it a lot. - breathing; something I'm still working on. I learned that as most people type, they don't breathe and tense up. This has negative effects on your muscles/tissues and leads to unnecessary strain. - posture (split, ergo, ortho keyboards help with posture naturally).

Good luck - wrist pain is scary but it's really improved for me. I typed a lot every day - programming, prompting, messages, emails, etc and no pain. (It's fucking magical)

Here is how I learned touch-typing dvorak-fr :

1) I photoshopped a photo of my not-dvorak keyboard moving the keys to their dvorak-fr positions

2) I fixed that photo on top of my screen. The physical layout was Azerty (not dvorak) and looking at it was useless. I searched the keys looking at the photo above my screen, not looking at the keyboard.

3) I grew more and more confident, and in a few months I was touch-typing in dvorak-fr - I've since discovered Bépo layout and wish I knew it too.

That's commitment - I love it!

I'm learning a bit more about various layouts that people use - I'm considering adding a feature to my https://www.typequicker.com/practice where folks can build any layout (and have the hand+keyboard visualization of that layout they built).

Do you think this would be appealing to folks who try alternative layouts? It would involve a bit of work from my end so I want to prioritize accordingly on my TODOs

I have yet to meet someone who replies "me too" when I mention I use dvorak-fr.

The work/reward balance may be punishing. I have no idea on the market share of alternative keyboard layouts and no idea where to find it. 1% ? 0.1 ?

> I have yet to meet someone who replies "me too" when I mention I use dvorak-fr.

I see - that's something I was afraid of. Way before releasing Type Quicker I had actually started working on adding all these layouts but put that on hold to prioritize other things. So far, it seems QWERTY is still like like 99% of users

What helped me finally learn touch typing was unlabeled key caps, for both my keyboards at work and home.

Oh that's a smart idea!

Did you intentionally order custom keycaps and replace it on your keyboard?

One solution I'm trying out to help users is on https://www.typequicker.com/practice I added a keyboard + hand visualization guide - to help so that folks get used to not looking down on their keyboard.

What's hard about it is that no matter how many exercises I do every day, I then have to go back to work and be able to fully type at the speed I am used to. So, I can't really build the habit of touch typing or get faster at it because of that.

It's hard, but you have to take the hit at work if you're going to make the switch. Lasted about three weeks for me.

Yeah, absolutely - this is a big one for sure.

I was lucky that I picked up during school so that it wasn't as much of a sacrifice of productivity.

What is your current typing habit? Do you pick-peck or is it some variation of the standard touch typing technique.

One thing I tried when I started touch typing as well was to progressively learn it. e.g.: "I'm just going to focus on using the correct finger for this one symbol/character for now" and just do that until it became natural. Can integrate that into your work potentially?

Yeah I had a touch typing class for a quarter in 8th grade. I repeatedly cheated by lifting the paper obscuring my hands and never learned how to type. It's a notable lifetime regret!

> I repeatedly cheated by lifting the paper obscuring my hands and never learned how to type

Haha, this is how I feel towards a second language. In Canada, French classes are mandantory to a certain grade - I wish I put in more effort - it's so fun knowing other languages even a bit

> It's a notable lifetime regret!

Change that ;).

Never to late - I built https://www.typequicker.com/practice (I'd welcome the feedback as well!) for this reason.

I learned touch typing in my mid twenties - took me a while to get to my current speed (partially also because I explored various split keyboards and layouts and such) but it's just a few minutes every few days

I like this site, I have been trying. One suggestion to you OP, if there is a way you can make lessons and if one can practice through one by one, it would be great!

Hey!

> I like this site, I have been trying.

Thanks a lot - was nervous to release it so having validation is great! I would have happily continued tinkering with it in my code cave while continuing to delay the release date lol

> One suggestion to you OP, if there is a way you can make lessons and if one can practice through one by one, it would be great!

I have a feature I'm working on that's exactly this - a progression type mode. I will prioritize it on next release! Thank you for the feedback and confirming the feature idea :)

That is awesome! I am looking forward to the release.

For those as old as me- we learned in grade school on IBM selectric typewriters- then when I learned Basicc it came in handy typing punch cards

Oh interesting! Was a course in school that was required?

It's a shame that there's no standardized typing courses or tests nowadays. It's such a critical skill...

I often compare touch typing (and just typing fast in general) to a chef's knife skills in the kitchen.

You'd be bullied out of a kitchen immediately if you didn't know how to cut/chop properly. Yet when it comes to typing, it's not the case even though folks type on keyboards on their jobs all day long.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com