Touch typing?

[_ghost_]

I learned touch typing in school despite the fact that it was disappearing from the curriculum in most places during the early part of my childhood. The school I went to was private and very old school--mostly for conservative, rejecting modernity kinds of reasons, but it sometimes worked in my favor when public schools stopped teaching a lot of basic skills. So we still had required typing and home economics classes and in-depth grammar lessons all the way through the twelfth grade.

I was taught to type from grades three to six, two or three times a week in the school computer lab, using a combination of two different programs: Mavis Beacon (which was originally released in the 80's; we definitely weren't using the most up-to-date version, but it would've been one from the late 90's or early 00's) and typing.com, which is a much less comprehensive but completely free and browser based version of the same concept. We had these rubber covers to put over the keyboards so we couldn't look at them, and the exercises we were doing varied a lot. Some of them were just strings of random letters, some of them were paragraphs, some were timed, and we were usually graded on our accuracy. We also spent a lot of time practicing with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but the majority of our time while I was in elementary school was spent on typing. In junior high we focused entirely on the Microsoft programs.

A lot of my classmates didn't actually put any effort into this and didn't see the point of continuing to use it outside of class, but the habit ended up sticking for me. These days I don't do it fully accurately; there are a few keys where I use the finger that feels most convenient rather than the one I'm supposed to use, and I've never been good with the numbers or symbols and usually have to look, but for the most part I did end up using the typing skills I learned in school. It's very useful if you ever need to copy something, which I do relatively often because I'm a writer who does all my rough drafts by hand, so I have to be able to transcribe that, and it's a lot easier to do if you don't have to look at the keys. Every so often I test my typing speed just out of curiosity, and I can consistently type about 75-80 words per minute. My accuracy goes down if there are a lot of numbers or symbols involved, and also I'm just bad at spelling anyway, but I feel pretty good about it. It's one of those things that doesn't really matter than much but it still makes me proud of myself; after all, most people my age get along just fine without knowing how to touch type, but I'm still faster. That's cool.

[Junebug]

Yes, I touch type. Recent online test says 77 wpm. I do think it's worth it because it means I can write as quickly as I think of the words. I also use Emacs for my writing, which is most useful when your fingers already know where the keys are located. So I would recommend it to everyone who's on a computer a lot.

[IndigoGolem]

I have to look at my keyboard to use the number pad and sometimes when i start typing because i use a custom layout that moves the home row and the bumps on FJ don't work for me. Aside from that i touch type fairly quickly, though my accuracy could use some work. Apparently i learned to fix my mistakes as i make them rather than just type things right the first time.

I'm not sure touch typing on a touchscreen keyboard is possible. I mean, logically it must be, i just find it so much harder without being able to feel the keys as i press them. Japanese flick-style keyboard layouts can help a little with that but i've still found that i look at my phone keyboard a lot more than the text field when i'm typing on mobile. More so now that i've switched to a phone with a less customizable keyboard and smaller keys.

I do highly recommend touch typing on a computer. Assuming your layout doesn't do something ridiculous like putting the two most common letters in your language on keys that are harder to reach than the home row, it's the fastest and most comfortable way i know to put text into a computer.

It is a shame that almost all typing courses and lessons are for QWERTY. Plenty of better layouts exist now and some are even fairly common, but if you want to learn one you have to teach yourself.

[candycanearter07]

It's funny, I remember absolutely hating the "typing lessons" when I was in school, but I'm actually pretty alright at touch typing today. I'm prettttyy sure I taught myself how to do it from playing a lot of TF2 and those kindsa games as a kid, I was always super chatty in the in game chat and learned how to type stuff out quickly to not get killed out of nowhere ;)

[hikatamika]

I touch-type, because back when I used to sort of… chicken-peck (or whatever non-standardized typing is called), it involved much more hand and wrist movement, and as someone who draws a lot… it all led to repetitive strain injuries. 

As a kid, growing up, I had Garfield and SpongeBob licensed typing games. And I was pretty good at them, like, I was learning the stuff, but touch typing didn't stick with me as a habit until I was a post-college adult, experienced repetitive strain injuries, and had better motivations to stick with touch typing.

[MarcieBee]

we had typing classes in the sixth grade for maybe a quarter of the year but we didn't pay attention and neither did anyone else. Our typing's slowly improved over time and now on monkeytype we can hit about 86 average words per minute with good enough accuracy. But when I'm typing like this, going from the brain to the screen, my speed goes down a lot but my accuracy goes up. I think the difference is interesting! Best advice for learning how to touch type is to do it a ton on a keyboard you enjoy using. We have a mechanical something or rather and I don't think I could hit speed like this on another keyboard without some extra work. It doesn't have to be mechanical mind you, it can be the cheapest keyboard money can buy and you'll still gain a proficiency on it by just typing lots and lots! Also, a wrist rest really helps with ergonomics, and for us having a low profile keyboard helps too sine we can keep our paws flatter for ergonomics.

You'll know you've made it when your fingers start resting on the home row by default and not WASD lol

[thunderzizi]

i was forced to learn it in 8th grade & i just kept doing it. as a result i can type really fast but my accuracy does suffer a bit especially when i go Too fast... for example i just typed "rally" instead of really. it's also a good thing that made me memorize where keys are considering the keyboard that came with my computer has the paint on some of its keys worn off (actually it's worn a bit on all of the keys, but N M , and . are practically unreadable now... it's only like 3 years old so it's probably kinda cheap.)

[fablefound]

echoing what many people have said, a childhood at the desk (or back when i was real young, in the computer room) has made touch typing super instinctual. i like to say that i'm coordinated from my fingertips to my wrists, lol, because the rest of my body is much less obliging when it comes to, you know, moving properly.
also, the compulsory typing games never worked on me, either. i think the only times i ever really focused on and improved my typing were in the name of competition: seeing who could get the highest wpm (words per minute), or doing those little forum challenges that are like, "type your username with your eyes closed" 

[Dan Q]

I can, but I don't

I can fully touch type, but the muscle memory's not there so it's actually slower for me than using ~3 fingers on the left and ~2 fingers on the right (plus both thumbs) in sort-of a sloppy, "I know where the keys are but I'm not optimising for them", semi-touch-typing way.

(I typed the first paragraph "properly", but I almost failed when writing "touch type". Because I (incorrectly) used my first finger rather than my second on my left hand for the "c", my right hand tried to cover for it by having the first finger jump from the "h" of "touch" to the "t" of "type", even though "t" is a left-hand letter! Very sloppy!)

The problem for me has long been that I type a lot, every day, and I can't stand having to slow down in order to learn to be better at "proper" touch-typing! So I just press on in a suboptimal way. In practice, though: if I'm programming than I'm usually still thinking and planning slower than I'm typing anyway, so my typing speed isn't the bottleneck!

Except for DVORAK!

I had better success, interestingly, by learning to touch type DVORAK (a different keyboard layout). My thinking was that if I switched to DVORAK I'd be slower all-over and that would make forcing myself to touch type properly less of a burden. It kinda worked - I can touch type DVORAK with fewer instances of cheating than I can QWERTY! But where I struggle is with keyboard shortcuts!

Specifically Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste (CTRL/CMD and one of Z, X, C and V respectively). Because it turns out the way my brain has memorised these shortcuts isn't in terms of the letters I'm pressing, but in terms of the hand shape I make. Like how a guitarist might learn their chords: not by thinking about the actual notes they're playing, but about the position their hand takes. (I don't play guitar; I don't know if this is a good analogy.) The result was that I could be typing on DVORAK and you could ask me to press CTRL and I'd be fine, or C and I'd be fine, but if you asked me to copy something I'd press CTRL+K. Whoops!

I played for a while with remapping shortcuts, but that just introduced new problems. If I did it at the operating system level, it didn't reliably work everywhere and I'd catch myself out. If I did it in individual applications, it was a huge drag to set up each one. And in either case, I'd trip over the collisions I'd cause: need to press CTRL+J? I can do that... oh wait, that's the "chord" for "Cut", thanks to my remapping. Whoops again!

So I gave up on DVORAK and came back to my not-quite-touch-typing of QWERTY. It bugs me a little, but it's okay.

[IndigoGolem]

Shortcuts

Have you thought about getting a macropad? It's like a number pad not attached to a full keyboard, and you can program the keys to do about anything with QMK (Quantum Mechanical Keyboard) or similar firmware. I'm working on a custom keyboard at the moment and putting dedicated buttons for cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, &c. on it. QMK supports those keys independent of the shortcuts, so hopefully i won't have to worry about issues like redo being Ctrl+y in one program and Ctrl+Sft+Z in another, or copy being harder to use in programs where Ctrl+c is close.

I guess that would still be hard to use while touch typing, unless you set those keys up as a layer on your normal keyboard instead of a separate pad. I won't know how comfortable a setup like this is until my keyboard is done.

[Dan Q]

Have you thought about getting a macropad?

Yes indeed! I've owned and built several mini-keyboards, but sadly my muscle memory for several key shortcuts (especially cut/copy/paste) is so strong that I've never been able to retrain myself to use the "extra" keys instead.

I currently make good use of one to control my Deskflow setup, though: different buttons "jump" my cursor and focus to different ones the five or so computers I access with the same keyboard and mouse, another button forces the cursor to stay on the screen it's on (useful when gaming!), and a final one locks all of the computers currently connected to the cluster. I did a mini demo video if you're interested:

[varve]

I taught myself to touch-type when I was a teenager, and it's a really handy skill to have!

The games for learning touch typing skills never clicked for me. What I did instead was transcribe! I was writing a novel, pen and paper, and I wanted it on the computer. That was my motivation.

First, I watched the keyboard and taught myself how all ten fingers were supposed to move around the keyboard. I'd read one sentence, type it, check the screen, fix any mistakes, repeat.

Once I got comfortable with that, I would read one sentence, close my eyes, type it, open my eyes, check the screen, fix any mistakes, repeat.

Once I got reasonably comfortable with that, I could keep my eyes on the paper and type, with occasional checks of the typed version to fix any mistakes.

After that, speed came with practice. The punctuation that isn't part of normal english prose fiction came a while later, when I started programming - but at least I knew where all the letters and quote marks were at that point!