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.

  • phantomwise@lemmy.ml
    4·
    11 days ago

    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.

    • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
      3·
      11 days ago

      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?

      • phantomwise@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        11 days ago

        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.

        • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
          1·
          11 days ago

          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 😬

          • phantomwise@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            11 days ago

            Yeah if you need to use different computers often it might be best to stick with qwerty 😢

      • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
        2·
        11 days ago

        Highly recommend the graphite keyboard layout. I’ve bounced around on various ones for years, but settled on graphite now.

    • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
      4·
      12 days ago

      Thanks! I found a few reddit threads suggesting typing.com as the best for absolute beginners, and I have to say I think it worked pretty well for me. Especially in the motivation to keep moving forward without getting frustrated, by way of small goals and tracked success. Though I guess we’ll never know if something else would’ve worked better 🤷‍♂️

      Now that I’ve got some basic skills under my belt, I’m gonna start looking for alternatives. Typing.com is definitely just for beginners.

      Actually, after finding this community, and seeing the recommendations in the first post, I’ve been looking at keybr.com and monkeytype.com

      At first I really liked keybr, but when I made an account, the ads turned on and were super obnoxious. I know ad blockers exist, but eh. I’ll play with it some more and see if I want to go premium. I don’t mind paying for things that are worth it.

      Then I tried monkeytype, and it’s really slick too. And the ads are much more subdued, and only on the results page. Plus I could turn them off if I needed to.

      I’m gonna play around with both of them for awhile, and see which one sparks the most joy.

      • ghu@lemmy.ml
        2·
        10 days ago

        I was in your shoes too. I liked monkeytype but it became boring after a month, then I found https://www.typelit.io/

        If you like to read novels as I do, you will love it. You basically have to retype books as you read them.

        • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
          1·
          10 days ago

          Interesting! I’ll check it out.

          So far I’m still going between keybr and monkeytype. I like the individual key analytics of keybr, but I like the style of monkeytype. 🤷‍♂️

      • Habahnow@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        11 days ago

        Nice, yeah i never tried typing, i might check it out too. I like Monkey mainly for the UI as well as the stats that they keep track of. I used it mainly because i wanted to prepare for my switch to a split key board (splitkb’s kyria) and i wanted to see my tgyping speed vs that of when I’m using the keyboard. I went from about 60wpm to 10 with the new keyboard. Now I’m back to about 50 wpm. goodluck on your journey!

        • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
          2·
          11 days ago

          Thanks!

          I was actually thinking about 3d printing a split keyboard, just for fun. But I was worried about messing up what I’m learning, so I decided against it.

          Have you retained your ability to type fast on a standard keyboard?

          • Habahnow@sh.itjust.works
            2·
            11 days ago

            I haven’t actually tested it, but i for sure type worse in a standard keyboard now, but mainly because its so infrequent. I think if i had to work with a standard keyboard, i’d get back in the flow of things easier.

            • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
              2·
              11 days ago

              Hmmm, I touch a lot of keyboards throughout my week, I need to retain my qwerty ability. So maybe I would, just through use of both types? As long as they’re all qwerty I guess 🤔

              • Habahnow@sh.itjust.works
                2·
                10 days ago

                The issue I have is that, even though it’s qwerty, some buttons are different. I have a total of 48 keys so some buttons function as 2 buttons (enter and alt, as well as others) as well as a staggered layout. Mainly just slows me down slightly, but If I type either a regular keyboard for a bit, i start to get used to it again.