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How to Type 3x Faster

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Re: How to Type 3x Faster

#21

Post by ravenide »

The core idea seems to be to map shortcuts to sequences of characters. My experiences suggest that this has promise. Using normal QWERTY, I currently type 160 wpm on average at 95%+ accuracy. I can get up to 180-190 if I risk letting typos through. I noticed that I unconsciously adopted a related idea to the one suggested here: my fingers automatically type out sequences of letters that I'm used to. For example, "-tion" is a common suffix. Instead of typing t, then, i, o, n, my fingers just bang out "tion" as one fluid motion, like a piano scale.

There's a special type of keyboard called steno that takes this further. Instead of typing out individual letters, your keyboard has about 20 keys, and you use "chords" of keys to type entire syllables at a time. Experts can reach upwards of 300 wpm. Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7AFutd9Gos. I tried to do this but it took too much time to learn.

Re: How to Type 3x Faster

#22

Post by Swizec »

I used to type 750 words every morning as a daily journaling practice. Kept the habit for 5+ years. Every day, wake up, type 750 words of whatever's on your mind, move on. Takes about 6 minutes.

Over time my typing became fast and reliable enough that it just doesn't need to be any faster. It's as fast as I can think.

Shortcuts slow me down because they don't fit naturally. They cause a hiccup in the brain. A little pause when you think of the right shortcut to use. So I never invested in shortcuts.

But take my ZSH history away and it's like chopping off an arm. Maybe that counts as having a bazillion shortcuts.

Re: How to Type 3x Faster

#23

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

I just switched to dvorak many years ago. Not coming back, though hotkeys are a mess.

(I'm still fast with qwerty, surprisingly, skill doesn't deteriorate. I guess it works like speaking languages, you can be fluent in more than one)

Re: How to Type 3x Faster

#24

Post by hinkley »

golergka wrote: post #12
Graziano_M wrote: post #9

I predicted (incorrectly) that this would just say "Change keyboard layouts". I actually made myself do that ~5 years ago (to colemak). Ultimately I am not sure if it was worth the effort, but I can tell you that I type at least 40% faster (tested), and typing Ultimately does it matter? Maybe on slack, but not while I'm coding. To me, learning my editor well (Vim) is where I got my 40% from while coding.

> Ultimately does it matter? For coding, no. If your typing speed is your bottleneck, you're doing something wrong — either don't use your abstractions the right way and write too much code, or don't know your editor macro engine well enough. Probably both. But for writing prose? Yes. Being able to type faster gives you more freedom to test more ideas, get more rough material and then edit it out.

I think it goes well beyond 'writing too much code'.

If you're coding at >40wpm sustained, you're basically vomiting out code without a care in the world.

I could see people getting into trouble if they can't manage 30 wpm typing speed, which seems to disagree with what I just said, but coding often comes in little microbursts, and if it takes you too long to get an idea down, you might get distracted by something else and forget what the next step is. I believe there's a law of diminishing returns there, where going from 7 seconds to 6 has a bigger payoff than going from 4 to 3.

Re: How to Type 3x Faster

#26

Post by moltar »

I have been growing my shortcut library since it was added to Apple software. I still don’t do the extreme shortcut stuff that the author talks about though.

However, I do find it somewhat annoying still because often my shortcuts clash with the words that start with the same characters.

I guess the lesson for me is to pick better shortcuts.

Need to make a tool that would check if a given shortcut will collide with a dictionary word.

My worst offender is “atm”, which expands to “at the moment”, but sometimes I need to find an ATM to withdraw some cash :)

Re: How to Type 3x Faster

#27

Post by moltar »

golergka wrote: post #10

Really enjoyed the sausage story — a perfect counter-balance to Chesterton's fence. Of course, in the end both anecdotes are about value of curiosity.

I’ve heard the same story before, but with a turkey that the daughter cut a piece from, because it didn’t fit into the cooking dish.

Re: How to Type 3x Faster

#28

Post by [deleted] »

ravenide wrote: post #21

The core idea seems to be to map shortcuts to sequences of characters. My experiences suggest that this has promise. Using normal QWERTY, I currently type 160 wpm on average at 95%+ accuracy. I can get up to 180-190 if I risk letting typos through. I noticed that I unconsciously adopted a related idea to the one suggested here: my fingers automatically type out sequences of letters that I'm used to. For example, "-ti…

[deleted]

Re: How to Type 3x Faster

#30

Post by ryzenecc10 »

golergka wrote: post #12
Graziano_M wrote: post #9

I predicted (incorrectly) that this would just say "Change keyboard layouts". I actually made myself do that ~5 years ago (to colemak). Ultimately I am not sure if it was worth the effort, but I can tell you that I type at least 40% faster (tested), and typing Ultimately does it matter? Maybe on slack, but not while I'm coding. To me, learning my editor well (Vim) is where I got my 40% from while coding.

> Ultimately does it matter? For coding, no. If your typing speed is your bottleneck, you're doing something wrong — either don't use your abstractions the right way and write too much code, or don't know your editor macro engine well enough. Probably both. But for writing prose? Yes. Being able to type faster gives you more freedom to test more ideas, get more rough material and then edit it out.

Dragon speech recognition (Professional Individual v15) works way faster and far more accurately than I ever thought it would. Keyboard typing actually involves more backspacing over mistakes than Dragon does. Dragon makes 120-200+ wpm effortless whereas 100+ wpm on keyboard requires concentration and is fatiguing. Dragon alas only runs on Windows but it works great inside a VirtualBox VM on Linux and Mac. (The VM setup is a major time commitment though.)
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