1mo ago

Learning to touch type. A few decades too late, but learning nonetheless

I've always been somewhat fast at typing, at least compared to your average hunt and peck person. But I've always had to look down.

So if I was typing something from memory, I could go something like 35 to 45wpm. But I could never test that high on typing tests, because I have to look at my hands, not the screen.

So in my downtime at work the last couple months, I've been practicing touch typing. This is as far as I've gotten, but it's a nice foundation to build on.

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17 comments

That's great! I was the same, typing reasonably fast so I never bothered to learn touch typing, until I switched keyboard layout. Since I had to learn again, I thought I might as well learn to type without looking. I'm doing 50+ wpm on colemak now, and it's much less straining on the hands than qwerty.
- That's interesting! Today is the first time I've heard of colemak, and this is the second time I've stumbled into it today.
  I'm not opposed to eventually learning it, but, my concern is that qwerty is everywhere.
  Do you ever get confused when you sit at someone else's computer? Can you easily switch between the two?
  
  Highly recommend the graphite keyboard layout. I've bounced around on various ones for years, but settled on graphite now.
  
  I like colemak better than the other alternatives to qwerty because it keeps Q, W, Z, X, C, V in the same place, so the common shortcuts like Ctrl-C and such stay the same, which is really nice. The only thing I'm not a fan of is the placement of K and L, so I've switched them around so the L is back in the same place as in qwerty.
  There's this website if you want to give it a try without changing your keyboad layout : https://www.colemak.academy/
  As for having to use a computer with another keyboard layout... yeah that's a massive pain 😅 I need to look at each letter before typing. If I make an effort I can remember some of the letters, but not all (I never learned where most were in qwerty anyway). But I try not to remember and I just look, otherwise my brain will get used to qwerty again and once I'm back on my own computer it will try to make me type some letters as if I was using qwerty...
  But before switching I was already confused when sitting at someone else's computer because I used qwerty but everyone here uses azerty, which is like if you took qwerty and tried to make it different in massively stupid ways because IT'S FRANCE OF COURSE WE NEED TO MAKE THINGS MORE STUPID AND COMPLICATED THAN THEY NEED TO BE DAMMIT. And no, don't tell me azerty is to make typing French accents easier, it's a mess you can't even type all of them since they don't all have dead keys... on Windows I had to use ALT+number for some accents. Azerty should burn in the darkest pit of hell along side daylight saving time 😡
  Qwerty might not be optimal, but at least it makes sense.
  
  Thanks for the write-up!
  That's what I was worried about with alternate layouts. I want to type fast and comfortably, but I also find myself on a lot of different computers throughout my week, and only one of them is mine. I'll probably stick to qwerty for now. Though I'll still poke at it for fun 👍
  I didn't know about azerty, sounds dumb 😬
  
  Yeah if you need to use different computers often it might be best to stick with qwerty 😢

17 comments