Hacker News Reader

Comment by goku12 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com