Really Amazing.
Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels
341–350 of 394 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels
#342"[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…
> Amazingly it's like music
Programming is the exact same way. If ever I'm in doubt of someone's design and I have an inkling of respect for them, I'll try to design the code from scratch in my head, or sometimes even redesign a toy version myself. This usually surfaces some weird property of the problem that explains their code. You can also go through their thought processes and see exactly how they made decisions along the way. I'd argue you can even infer philosophical viewpoints in some cases, too - all without actually communicating with the author.
I love that about humans. One of the things I really admire about us.
Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels
#343This is really cool. Some feedback: - I'd prefer if the words not typed were in a lighter shade of grey so there were greater contrast between them and the words I've completed. I know this would reduce contrast with the page but I found the fact that they are such a strong grey to be somewhat of a distraction. Different people will have different preferences here, so maybe a slider or knob that can be used to adjust…
You can correct all mistakes by using backspace and retyping what you're meant to type.
I got a 100% accuracy in the end but that's what I expected as it's the same behavior in other typing exercises as well.
Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels
#344This is really cool. Some feedback: - I'd prefer if the words not typed were in a lighter shade of grey so there were greater contrast between them and the words I've completed. I know this would reduce contrast with the page but I found the fact that they are such a strong grey to be somewhat of a distraction. Different people will have different preferences here, so maybe a slider or knob that can be used to adjust…
Hello! A text darkness slider is a great idea -- I may implement that in a future update.
You should be able to backspace all the way back up the page. If backspace isn't working for you, feel free to let me know which browser and OS you're using, and if you're using any extensions that might effect backspace functionality. Thanks!
Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels
#345Can you add famous speeches? For the same reason Hunter S. Thompson chose to re-write famous books, I'd like to re-write a famous political speech every morning. Also, how about pulling in song lyrics from your favorite band? The option to load your own content would be cool. But the speeches would be my fav option.
Hello -- if I come across a good compilation of famous speeches I'll add them. Loading your own content is coming in a future update, too. Thanks!
Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels
#346Hello, nice work! Unfortunately, since for now I am navigating through my keyboard only (not using a mouse because of lack of batteries) I can't really use it. I am using linux and chrome with vimium and when I press f (to reveal the links) it doesn't "capture" any links for the books. I also tried it using tab to go to the books and it just jumped over them (!) I presume you are doing some fancy JS things in the fro…
Hello! Sorry the site isn't more keyboard friendly (which is indeed ironic). Plus I imagine if you were to get into the typing portion of the site, you may get stuck, since keystrokes register differently in there. I'll see if I can't make things work smoother for keyboard only users at some point in the future. Thanks!
Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels
#347Excellent tool. How is WPM calculated? There are a few things to consider -- time spent not typing when taking a mid-chapter break, number of characters in a word (unless a words are counted literally by splitting at space characters), or if characters are counted instead of words, average number of characters per word...
Hello! WPM is calculated by splitting space characters, and is tracked on a per page bases. If you're cursor is on the first character of a page, it's not tracking your WPM, so that's where you would take a break. Thanks!
Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels
#348Love this idea. I've recently decided to do some deliberate practicing around typing. I've been using keybr [1] which is a great site that randomly makes up phonetically accurate pseudo-words and has you type them. The goal there is to have you practice weak combinations of keys, and they have an excellent stats dashboard to show you your progress over time. I was able to raise my typing speed from ~90 wpm to ~110 wp…
I also used keybr extensively for some time while switching to an ergonomic layout and I have two additions to that:
- The layout is much more bearable when using ublock to remove about 60% of the site, makes it much cleaner and more enjoyable to use
- In my native language that I used for training, german, the site would frequently generate words that exist but are just spelt wrong or just stop before the last character, ruining my stats because my brain is auto-completing and auto-correcting what I'm reading so I have to go back and correct my writing to something wrong. This gets very annoying very quickly. I switched back to english after a week because that works much better and I'd recommend others to do the same.
Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels
#349Hello, nice work! Unfortunately, since for now I am navigating through my keyboard only (not using a mouse because of lack of batteries) I can't really use it. I am using linux and chrome with vimium and when I press f (to reveal the links) it doesn't "capture" any links for the books. I also tried it using tab to go to the books and it just jumped over them (!) I presume you are doing some fancy JS things in the fro…
Hello! Sorry the site isn't more keyboard friendly (which is indeed ironic). Plus I imagine if you were to get into the typing portion of the site, you may get stuck, since keystrokes register differently in there. I'll see if I can't make things work smoother for keyboard only users at some point in the future. Thanks!
Great! For the actualy typing portion I have added an exclude rule for vimium for the https://www.typelit.io/typing-console/* and it works fine.
Re: Show HN: I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels
#350Really nice idea! I think it would be awesome if there was a "handwriting" mode (for everyone looking to improve their handwriting...), in which you get smaller chunks of text and just have to hit the space bar (or any other key) to mark them as "written" and show the next chunk.