Touch Typing

Opening up your request for advice with an attack on people isn't helpful, it makes lemmy a more combative place, and will diminish the totality of advice you get.

Since your still learning typing, you have a great opportunity to program yourself with chorded keying rather then the standard touch typing. I highly recommend it, its quite the force mutiplier.

As far as learning key layout, go full immersion, print out the key layout on paper, replace your keycaps with blanks (keep the home row bumps). It will suck for a week, but your more likely to learn the layout by touch this way. Keep playing your typing training games!

If you want to go full crazy, braille keycaps are fun

Good day to everyone except to the neo-liberals always btiching about .ml being a communist instance, we don't care about your oppinions.

Damn, you write a lot about people you don't care about.

Good day to everyone except to the neo-liberals always btching about .ml being a communist instance, we don't care about your opinions

About a year ago I finally took the time to learn it. Just make sure you know which finger should hit which keys. And then do a bunch of practice. My favorite way to to practice is Monkey type. Its all about the muscle memory. Doesn't take as long as you'd think ether. About 20 hrs of practice and I was just as fast as I was before. Then you will start getting really fast if you keep it up.

I was fortunate to not only have a typing class in school, but also the only computer game my grandma had was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Now I type for a living, so hey, I guess it must have paid off.

If you're already a hunt and peck typer, your brain wants to look at the keyboard to confirm where the key is before you press it. When learning touch typing, you'll want to shift your focus from the keyboard to the screen.

There are formal methodologies for learning where the keys are in relation to your fingers, but imo the most important thing is to not look at the keyboard. No matter what you end up typing, it's pretty easy to find backspace and try again. Your eyes verify on the screen if your fingers are giving the correct output, and your fingers find their way eventually.

Many students did benefit from having their hands visually obscured from them when typing. If you find you keep looking at the keyboard then you might want to look into that.

Try a typing game, there's lots of them now in several genres. I learned to touch type in secondary school, doing the old fashioned thing of taping a sheet of paper over the keyboard (and typing under it) so you can't see the keys. That works but I believe in the educational power of games, and it'll be more fun.

Otherwise, just practice. If you use lemmy on mobile, try switching to desktop to type more. Start writing letters to people or short stories or anything that just encourages you to type more.

I never learned typing using any method, just years of practicing writing when I was younger. I think one of the biggest things that will increase your competence is to not look at the keyboard. Force your eyes away and just try to type. This will have more results if you've already gotten the basic key layout down at least a bit. You'll make a lot of mistakes, and when you do try to not look, just move your finger to the next key over and try again. It's a bit painful to do it this way, but it will make you much more comfortable over time.

I didn't learn until I was in my fourth year of college, so it's not too late. Dvorak is a lot easier to learn and use than Qwerty; I've heard Colemak is even better. It can be better to learn one where the keyfaces don't correspond, so you're not tempted to revert to hunt-and-peck.

What a weird way to open a post.

I think a lot of it is down to just having good proprioception with your hands. I can't remember the last time I looked at my keyboard while typing so it's possible your proprioception isn't the greatest. Does speech to text interest you?

I would suggest getting an ortholinear keyboard. When I first switched to a Kinesis advantage, the FIRST thing I noticed was how many terrible habits I had of hitting a key with the wrong finger (even twisting my hand about, if you can believe that). Having keys in line with actual finger geometry cured that mess up real quick!

Practice I guess. I learned in a hs computers class where we had to do timed assignments, copying spreadsheets and transcribing speech and such. Hunt and Peck was simply too slow to do it, we had to learn our homerow to get a pass.

Also death to neoliberalism.

Permanently Deleted

Are you on Windows 11?

Regardless of how your touch typing improvement project goes, be sure to get a good mic. Voice typing has come a long way, if you work in circumstances where you can speak aloud. It's usually faster than my touch typing most of the time (not that I'm a blazing fast typist, but still).