I’ve recently started trying to improve my typing speed, which has probably been held back by my somewhat unconventional typing style. Formal touch typing was never a part of my education, and while years of computer use eventually led to me being able to type without looking, I’m probably not as efficient as I could be.
Can you touch type - and with proper form? QWERTY, DVORAK or other layout?
I’ve actually leaned that in school, on a fully mechanical typewriter. But i don’t use this skill, as touch type is completely useless for programming.
I taught myself to touch-type with proper form after I built myself a split keyboard with the Dvorak layout (I figured since I’d never learned to properly touch-type with QWERTY it’d be as good an opportunity as any to pick up a better optimised layout). I gotta say, it does feel pretty great being able to type something with my eyes closed, or more practically, qouting stuff from a textbook without having to look at what I’m doing on my laptop.
Yes, I can touch type. I had a computer class in my year of high school where they taught us all how to do it.
left side only.
let’s call ot WASD-typing :D
I was never good at typing until I got a job programming. Never took a course or anything so I’m definitely not using proper form, but if you use a keyboard enough your fingers learn where the keys are.
A course might help, but like all muscle memory, the trick is to just practice it enough times that you don’t need to think about it anymore.
i touch type qwerty and dvorak. when i was working in a call center i started learning one-handed qwerty touchtyping, too.
Partially, only with one hand. I use one finger on the other hand
I was never able to touch type up through middle of high school despite typing papers and taking formal typing courses. Once I got into online PC gaming and also programming I got good at touch typing very fast. Is typing a skill you use daily? Natural practice beats forced if you already have the fundamentals down. QWERTY for me.
Same. I tried really hard to learn it but gave up in frustration. 5ish years with plenty of computer use later I suddenly found myself typing without looking.
Yes. You have no other choice when you’re blind. I prefer unlabeled keyboards.
I don’t use all the right fingers but can type 80+ wpm, so you can be plenty efficient with enough practice.
No. And I’ve been programming for the past 20 years.
To be fair, programming is basically the art of making the computer do as much as possible with as little typing as possible.
Yeah, ever since we learned it in middle school. QWERTZ
QWERTZ
How to tell us you’re German without telling us you’re German 😄
As a Belgian, we have AZERTY as standard, which is so much worse. I wish we could’ve followed the German instead of the French influence keyboard-wise.
Oh my god the AZERTY… I naively tried it out for like a week or two and quickly gave up on the idea. The numbers and symbols being the reverse of QWERTY was just way too much of a headache, especially for programming. Unfortunately workplace requires all work computers to have AZERTY so
especially for programming Indeed! I grew up with azerty and still got tired quickly of pressing shift for most of the most basic symbols. Before learning to code, I don’t really remember having issues with azerty.
workplace requires all work computers to have AZERTY
dang that’s tough. Usually they ask me what I’m used to, not sure if I could accept a job offer if it came with azerty 😆
Azerty isn’t even a good layout for French, that’s how bad
is itit is. There’s a new and supposedly improved version of it, but nobody makes keyboards for it
I too live in Belgium and azerty is absolutely the worst, i hace it sometimes at uni. Luckily i grew up using qwertz, later switching to qwerty.
Argh sometimes even, that’s annoying! Luckily the changes are quite limited for non-symbol keys. Still I usually just add the qwerty keyboard layout if not present. This approach costs me the least time.
Qwerty and qwertz are pretty similar, recently even changed to qwerty full time only using qwertz (blind) for special german characters. Before uni we had mandatory school laptops in azerty, and indeed the best method than was to jusr change it in windows and blind type.
Um. What?
I was under the impression QWERTZ was a German thing, seems it covers a much bigger area than that! Apologies!
One of the most useful things we learned in school 100%
I don’t recall much of my process learning touch typing on qwerty but the process was frustrating at first learning dvorak because the qwerty muscle memory kept getting in the way. But I made myself use it in IRC and kept a diagram of the layout on my 2nd monitor. I also played some typing games. Then, over time, I got better and better with it and started moving other programs over until it was my main layout. Now the first thing I do on a new to me PC is go looking for keyboard layout options (and holy fuck MS has moved that shit all over the place).
Wayland (or something in KDE) has the best handling I’ve seen yet. Gaming was always kinda annoying as different games have different levels of support for alternate layouts.
On windows, some would just work, remapping the default keybinds to the layout (because moving isn’t about hitting wasd specifically, but the keys in those places) and text types as expected. Some I’d go into options and remap to dvorak. Some I’d just switch the layout and be annoyed any time I had to type text instead of hitting keybinds.
On Linux, Fedora Cinnamon, it was just random whether the layout would work like I wanted or do something else, like reverse (where even switching layouts keeps the incorrect dvorak layout), or sometimes it just ignored the system layout entirely. I had to remap and reset to defaults a lot.
But then I switched to Fedora KDE and it’s perfect. Only “issue” is I had to set the default to qwerty, but then it uses that layout to remap the bindings for other layouts and both bidings and typing just works all the time now.
Been touch typing Dvorak for about 25 years, qwerty for about 10 years before that. My hands used to feel tired at the end of the day, when I broke my wrist the occupational nurse suggested Dvorak, so when it healed I taught myself to type Dvorak. Probably a few weeks to learn, six months to get speed. (The advantage of a cushy government job). I can type all day now without problems. If you’re going to spend any significant time at a keyboard, I personally think it’s worth investing the time to learn to type properly, whatever layout you choose to use.
Try typing my username in Dvorak :)
Now I’m trying to figure out what you name spells with the same keys on qwerty vs dvorak
Would you recommend switching to Dvorak for someone who already touch types very fast (80-90 wpm)?
Can you switch between the two easily?
my speed never recovered from switching, but for long sessions, it’s more comfortable.
I can touch type, but not with proper form. I use a really fast “hunt and peck” method with my two index fingers and my other fingers for specific keys such as backspace, shift, space, ctrl, etc. I can typically type between 70 - 80 wpm with high accuracy.
Thats me, I the ring finger only gets involved if I need to press 2 of ctrl/alt/shift at the same time
