Learning Touch Typing

Ways to learn touch typing

Software
- Mavis Beacon
- gtypist
- http://www.typingstudy.com
Never look at the keyboard and always position hands on the home row keys.
Look until you get speed and then switch to no look.
Free tutorial: http://www.wikihow.com/Type
Make yourself do it for x (say 5) minutes a day. Eventually you will be more inclined to touch type because it is so much more efficient.

Please list any others that you can think of.

Covering or scraping off the markings on your keyboard is a ForcingDevice? for learning touch-typing. It has been known since the days of CheaperByTheDozen. Nowadays you can buy DasKeyboard, a standard IBM-style keyboard with all its keys unmarked.

I once taught myself to touch type with the keyboard upside down. I did this to test a computer program that teaches morse code. I already knew morse code so I needed something new to practice. My training program would send a letter and then wait for you to type it. You could keep trying letters until you got it. But if you didn't get it pretty quick it would just type it for you and then send it again.

I tried typing English text and did ok so long as I didn't go too fast. I'm sure I could have practiced for speed and been up there in a few days. I decided to not do that. In fact I didn't ever type upside down again because I was afraid that I might mess up my normal typing. -- WardCunningham

http://c2.com/morse -- This is the program that I was testing. I distribute ten to twenty copies a day even now, 25 years later.

p.s. An old timer gave me a tip for learning to copy morse code really fast: Don't write it down. And if you feel like you have to write it down (which I did) then turn out the lights. That worked great. After a few weeks of practice I stopped hearing morse code as a string of letters and started hearing words as if they were spoken. An odd skill for sure. But not as odd as typing upside down.

I wonder how common it is for programmers or computer scientists to not touch-type with all fingers? I use my two pointer fingers myself. I'm interested in hearing your comments.

I got through 6 years of computer science school typing with 2 fingers. I was at the point where I didn't have to look much of the time. I didn't learn proper touch typing until I forced myself to learn at my First Real Job. I made myself touch type for 5 minutes a day while typing up support tickets. I let myself look at the keyboard to make it less painful. Eventually my fingers learned the motions, and it felt better typing the "correct way", at which point I switched over more fully. Eventually I didn't need to look either. This process took about 6 months. I saw that the world record holding speed typist could type both dvorak and qwerty, which is what gave me the idea.

It's a lot easier to TouchType? when you are typing English. When programming, you have all sorts of symbols that butt in. And this stops you from touch typing. That's why one might prefer a language with a bit more English in it, and fewer symbols (Pascal?, SQL?, Smalltalk?), because when you do get typing fast and have some repetitive codework to do, it is much faster than say typing (&%# #$%^@^){}. Oops, I didn't mean to put down Perl. P.S. maybe that is why Perl programmers swear and when I write regexes, I swear.

Also, the arrow keys can make you stop touch typing. Some text editors try to resolve this by using CTRL-letter keys on the keyboard, but I think ThumbPad would ultimately be more efficient. Your thumbs are mainly wasted (I use my right thumb for the space bar, and the other thumb sits there wasting time)

There's another reason why symbols can be a menace to touch typing. All keyboard layouts in the broad QWERTY family firmly fix the mappings of the letter keys (and ',' and '.', it seems). But other symbols, including many computing standbys like '#', '\', '|' and '~', are quite likely to be in different places on the US IBM layout and other QWERTY layouts, such as QWERTY but non-US national layouts like the UK/Ireland or Italian schemes, some compact keyboards (for example, Toshiba often cheerily drops the key to the left of the '1' key), and older and/or less PC-centric keyboards. The upshot is that different QWERTY keyboards can often give touch-typing programmers a good fraction of the pain of, say, switching to AZERTY or DVORAK.

I had the good fortune (though I didn't think so at the time) to take a typing class in high school -- my speed+accuracy wound up getting me my first computer-related job in data entry, which I parlaid into bigger and better things as the years went by. As a writer and programmer, I can't imagine I would be anywhere near as productive in either profession without having that skill. --RobertDaeley

Agreed. This doesn't say much for public education, but I consider the Typing class to be the most valuable time I spent in high school. --KrisJohnson

I took "Personal Typing" in school, and did very poorly. I did, however, learn the home keys.

A few years later I found myself around teletype machines pretty much daily, and learned a bit of that -- which is a different kind of typing (the symbols/figures overlay the alphabetic keys and you shift back and forth between letters/figures, it's 5-bit coded).

Some years farther along I found myself in an admin job (kind of a recruiter and registrar) that required correspondence. Out came the tinny portable Royal, and I strove the recover what little skill I'd had. I'd rate my speed back then at 25-30 wpm.

Eventually, I took over for a telex operator who had changed jobs. At this point I think I had a pretty good working definition for Hell. The message traffic piled up all day long, and I couldn't type fast enough to get it done until late at night. I was getting no sleep. What little sleep I got was punctuated by nightmares of managers screaming at me for delaying their priority traffic. And then I'd wake up and discover I hadn't been dreaming.

I had to do something or go nuts. I started taking 15-20 minutes a day over lunch to practice. I'd type a sentence, The quick brown fox ... (or whatever) until I could do it ten times without looking. Then I'd pick another (Now is the time for all good men ... until I could do that ten times without looking. And so on. Then I'd recall whole sequences from AliceInWonderland and type those over and over until, without looking, they were right.

In about six weeks my typing speed doubled and my accuracy with it. My message throughput went up fourfold and more.

I used nothing from the "ASDFG" - "HJKL:" school of typing. Just ordinary words and sentences from life. Over and over. The discipline I had lacked in school became a necessity of life, and I built a skill because my sanity depended on it.

-- GarryHamilton

CategoryKeyboard, CheaperByTheDozen