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Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

typelit.io

91–100 of 394 posts

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#91
Very cool idea and beautiful design execution!

One nitpick: it would be helpful to only have to type out the words on the page rather than different symbols (maybe having it be a toggle). For example, in The Art of War, typing out all the bullet points and numbering can be tedious and not really what I'm looking for from a typing exercise.

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#93
post #14
post #2

"[Hunter S. Thompson] chose, rather than writing original copy, to re-type books like The Great Gatsby and a lot of Norman Mailer, the Naked and the Dead, a lot of Hemingway. He would sit down there on an old type-writer and type every word of those books and he said, 'I just wanna feel what it feels like to write that we'll.'" HST: "If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it's like music…

This was explained by HST in one of his letters, which was collected in the excellent three book collection of letters he sent and received to his friends. Including many famous writers. HST was always great in small rapid outputs of writing, which is captured well in his letters (similar to how his collection of articles are his most popular works, but these deserve a similar look). He obviously had some sort of ADD…

Still waiting for the third volume to actually drop? Can't find it available and all the amazon reviews are 5-star complaints about the delayed release :(

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#95

I typed a bit of Alice in Wonderland. I (touch)type slower than I read. I'd like to do this more, but I'm worried about getting RSI.

Don't know if it's just coincidence, but I was taught to type back in the mechanical typewriter era, and despite typing a great deal professionally haven't yet suffered from any form of RSI.

(We were taught to keep our hands parallel with our forearms and had to press with force, as electrical typewriters existed by then but none were in our classroom. It was kind of like piano posture.)

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#96
Well, this is absolutely perfect timing as my wife has just given me an Ergodex EZ for my birthday and I’ve been practicing on a one shot timed set of snippets from Alice in Wonderland.

Fantastic and really looking forward to reading while I practice. This is so cool!

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#97
post #2

"[Hunter S. Thompson] chose, rather than writing original copy, to re-type books like The Great Gatsby and a lot of Norman Mailer, the Naked and the Dead, a lot of Hemingway. He would sit down there on an old type-writer and type every word of those books and he said, 'I just wanna feel what it feels like to write that we'll.'" HST: "If you type out somebody's work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it's like music…

Would be super interesting if this holds true for 'copying out' code as well... it's all the edge case handling that can get boring to re-type out without context / comments...

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey I'm glad you asked! It's the way Nextjs handles urls with more than 1 param. If I prettify the URL then for some reason the page can't access them. Don't know if they've improved on it yet (or, who knows, maybe I'm just using it wrong) but it'll be fixed eventually.

That's interesting. Thanks for pointing me towards Next.js. I wasn't aware of that framework, but I'm checking it out.

Super cool framework that is only getting better. If you’re interested in framework spelunking-check out Remix by Ryan Florence and Michael Jackson (no, not that one...). It’s actually going to be paid but I’m very excited to try it. It handles some data loading pain points among others that seem very interesting.

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#99
post #58

I remember in high school, we had an English teacher with very high standards. After we had turned in our first essays, she gave everyone a failing grade, and put on a show of being very disappointed with our work. Instead of whatever was next on the syllabus, our next assignment was to rewrite, with paper and pen, three separate (3-5ish page) essays written on the same prompt, which she had saved over the years as e…

to be fair, your essays were all probably terrible and her standards were really not that high. If you don't believe me, go find a high school english teacher and have them show you what kids write. Most teachers are kind and skilled enough to know that such a rant does little good unless its obvious no one is trying

Well, they were definitely terrible by "Adult" standards, but that's not the standards that most high schoolers are held to. (And that's not the standard we were held to, I'm sure).

If your standard is the median for our age group, they were probably better-than-middling. It was an advanced class, after all.

Actually, I think that if nobody is trying, such an exercise would be counterproductive. In that scenario, the right thing to do would be to determine and address the reasons why nobody is trying. Like I said, it was an advanced class and people were trying, so it was relatively successful.

Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels

#100

Loving it! Just as a possible future improvement my eyes would probably be really happy about a dark mode :) EDIT: just realised OP already has it on TODO.

This should tide you over until then, works pretty seamlessly on this site: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...
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