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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Wow, Today I Learned that every commenter on HN types over 100 wpm (which is probably around 2-3 standard deviations faster than the mean). Here I thought I was fast at 70. I picked up a bad early habit of not using my right ring and pinky fingers, so I unfortunately only use 8 fingers. My typing is still faster than my thinking, though so I've never felt the need to race any faster.

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A lot of these people who say 100+ wpm or whatever really mean the 15 second test on monkeytype, that only tests words like “the” “that” “because”. It’s different than what an oldhead might mean by 100 wpm ;)

Maybe some people confused wpm and characters per minute... For writing software having 100% accuracy with numbers and special characters is more important than speed. I don't think 100 wpm is real for coding.

This is why I built wpm.silver.dev.

Theres no tolerance for typos on code and way more special characters than MonkeyType.

120 on monkeytype can be 50 on wpm

I like it but it's not really a comparable/usable result. My IDE auto suggests a lot of things and a lot of "words" could be reduced to a single tab key press.

For example, in golang, I have not typed a full if err != nil {} in years. "err.nn"+tab auto completes to the if, and "err.re" auto completes to the if + return err. To be able to compare what speed I really code at, I should be able to use these to speed things up.

Same as calling functions, I rarely type the full name and instead use tab auto complete. Same for for ranges, "nums.forr" autocompletes to the for i,n := range nums {} form.

Yes, but at the same time in a technical interview you don't control the IDE and you need to type it out. I.e. google interviews on a google doc.

Nice. Writing code is very different. People mostly seem to train English word-lists to increase wpm. But for code you constantly have to deal with new words, prefixes and special characters. Awkwardly placed special characters on the keyboard can ruin the flow. Dvorak, Colemak don't have any improvements over Qwerty - so they're most likely pretty useless.

Layouts with nicely placed special characters are all very non-standard. Building a custom keyboard nowadays is quite easy, but it takes some courage to train something that is seriously less standard than Dvorak ever was.

By far the biggest two things screwing me up here are problems with the app itself: The single-quote opens up the browser's quick-search, leaving the app and screwing up the flow, and the automatic yellow text that moves at a constant speed is extremely distracting if it ever gets ahead of me because of how much more visible it is compared to where the cursor actually is. And it's almost guaranteed to happen on the ones that use single quotes because of the first problem.

Use practice mode so you don't have the competing cursor!

Will look into the singlequotes issue!

I think the problem with this approach is that when I type, I don't type formatting because prettier can do that for me.

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