171–180 of 224 posts
It doesn't appear to respect my keyboard layout - I'm using colemak (which works fine) but with UK symbols instead of US (which works everywhere else, including the HN comment box, but not in Typing.io where it wants me to type US symblos: eg " and @ are swapped).
And besides improving your code-typing speed, it's also a nice way to get a hang of all different languages you might want to delve into. Alternatively, you can also polish your muscle memory on all the thousands of function, classes and method names you can find in your typical language/framework of choice.
The hash (#) character isn't working for me (UK layout keyboard, Firefox 10 on Ubuntu).
You even can't put more line breaks than it is - just type, character by character. If it checked the code in general (e.g. package names typed correctly - but not line breaks and stuff) - I'd totally use it. Not now, though.
This doesn't seem to work with keyboard layouts that are different than US keyboards. My german keyboard didn't work :(
But keeping my fingers on the home keys to type has always felt really awkward to me. I tend to position my hands differently depending on the word I'm about to type - in a way that let's me "roll" my fingers along in just the right sequence so it tends to be a series of short bursts where it would seem as if I'm actually just smashing a bunch of keys at once over and over again.
Edit: I just tried type racer and was getting 80+ wpm. /me wonders how people get 140+. :O
Where do people get these .io names? Are they really $50+ a year?
And yes, those domains are pretty expensive.
I am pretty sure many people do this too: whenever I type braces/brackets/parentheses/[/%$..] I type both open and close, then continue filling in the statement inside the completed pair of open/close. It is a very useful practice especially for languages with a love of open/close symbol pairs. When you try this in your app, the close gets marked as an error, and I couldn't find an easy way out.
I don't understand programmer's obsession with typing efficiency. We're not typists. Typing is a tiny fraction of the time I spend programming. Most of the time I'm thinking, or talking to another developer about a problem. I could have the fastest typing skills and most efficient editor and not even be marginally more productive.
I used to think so too.But learning touch typing has made me to better document my code. I no longer fret about writing API documentation, I almost add API documentation most of the methods I write. The blog post[1] Steve Yegge was the one that triggered me to consider touch typing seriously. 1. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.in/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, I'm glad you found the stats useful. In my initial version, I wasn't requiring the user to correct errors. I was personally getting errors rates around 3~5% , which appear good but seemed too low for the amount of errors I feel I make. Adding the need to backspace and correct keys revealed the true cost of mistyping a key, namely the wasted keys typed before correcting and all the backspaces. Thanks for point…
I was taught in typing class that its better to skip errors and then come back and correct them when you are done. Not that I follow that advice especially often, but I wonder if it would be more helpful to do that. I didn't like during the demo that I was forced to correct the problem before continuing.