A tool that increased my typing speed • Hacker News Board

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#161

Post by eitland » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

ThePadawan wrote: post #154

melling wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For programming, we should be trying to type less. Tools like TabNine should help: https://www.tabnine.com/

Besides the deep learning part, this is already very much what working in C# and Visual Studio (Code) is like. To get to > new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions { foo = 3 }); , the keystrokes would be more like > new FoobarGenerator() > new FoobarGenerator().Create( > new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions > new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions { foo = > new FoobarGenerator().Create(new Foo…

> Besides the deep learning part, this is already very much what working in C# and Visual Studio (Code) is like.

Or any of the big 3 Java IDEs.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#162

Post by Gravyness » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 3:45 PM UTC

aqme28 wrote: post #108

userbinator wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The typing speed absolutely is a bottleneck --- the more time spent typing, the less time spent thinking. Have you ever experienced times when you lost your train of thought because you were busy writing it down? That's what faster typing will avoid. It's true that the average typing speed will be low, but the higher your burst speed, the sooner you will return to thinking after each thought that needs to be written…

I don't think that's true. I can think while I type just fine. We are not machines who can do only one thing at a time. As an analogy-- plenty of people can play their instrument while they improvise the next bar in their head. Try it! Transcribe the words I've written here and while thinking about the weather.

> We are not machines who can do only one thing at a time

I thought most machines could do multiple things at once?

Humans barely walk and talk at the same time, and stumble much more likely than when not talking.

As someone who plays piano, you have to spend years perfecting it so it becomes automatic enough to offload your brain and only then you can improvise while playing. Your movements have migrated to a "fast" part of your brain. If you record yourself and listen to it, it's a whole different thing, you feel as if your ears were blocked to the melody, only listening enough to improvise the next key, and so on.

I am pretty sure, but to lazy to find sources which I know there are plenty, that Multitasking always yields worse quality results than doing one task. If you don't care about quality, then why don't you practice your dance moves as you write and think, as well?

If you're not doing something 100%, then you're half-assing two things.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#163

Post by bonestormii_ » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #129

bonestormii_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but it's the vim effect. For vim to become worth your time to learn to use effectively, you have to have a purpose to use it quite a lot. But it takes quite a lot of time, and causes quite a lot of errors in the mean time. Eventually, you are left with a skill and a tool that are a pleasure to use, but you literally must spend time actively learning how to use it. You cannot just pick it up, because you need t…

this is exactly why I use nano and don't spend time reading blog posts about editors.

Totally valid. I do like a vanilla vim though. It took some getting used to but I do find myself editing things in vim over ssh quite frequently and it is much easier for doing things like search/replace, etc.

Nano probably works too but I'm not nearly as proficient in it, so... vim!

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#164

Post by I_complete_me » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 8:06 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #87

stevage wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if anyone has ever set out to design the worst possible layout, and if so, what it would look like.

Could be a fun game. For starters I'd move the most useless keys to the index finger home row positions, perhaps pipe and backtick. Then I'd invert the sense of shift, so you have to hold it to type anything lowercase. I'd take all the most common two-letter sequences and I'd move those letters under the weakest finger. So T H E O A R S and N replace the punctuation keys on the right side. This should make it a real…

Can't figure out whether you are a sadist or a masochist but I love how you ran with _that_ particular ball. Kudos to you.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#165

Post by dnautics » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 11:13 PM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #116

dnautics wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow, it took me 3 weeks to get basic proficiency, but really slow. 6 months to parity with qwerty, about a year before I was truly comfortable with it. probably about 2 years before I was completely fluent with both, and 5 years before my brain could map my own personal keyboards with dvorak and default to qwerty in all other cases with nearly zero mistakes. These days (20 years on) I have no problem, running, say vi…

You’re saying 5 years before you could Dvorak at home, and also QWERTY on anyone else’s keyboard as needed?

Completely automatically and with nearly 99.9% accuracy.

"As needed" I would say around the 2 year mark, but with a bit of a blip to think about it.

But I could do this at the 6 month mark, just not accurately.. I would still be messing up letters at a ~1% rate, let's say.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#166

Post by dnautics » Tue, Oct 13, 2020, 11:15 PM UTC

thotsBgone wrote: post #98

dnautics wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow, it took me 3 weeks to get basic proficiency, but really slow. 6 months to parity with qwerty, about a year before I was truly comfortable with it. probably about 2 years before I was completely fluent with both, and 5 years before my brain could map my own personal keyboards with dvorak and default to qwerty in all other cases with nearly zero mistakes. These days (20 years on) I have no problem, running, say vi…

Did you do daily practice in that time?

No.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#167

Post by alias-dev » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 6:36 AM UTC

eitland wrote: post #161

ThePadawan wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides the deep learning part, this is already very much what working in C# and Visual Studio (Code) is like. To get to > new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions { foo = 3 }); , the keystrokes would be more like > new FoobarGenerator() > new FoobarGenerator().Create( > new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions > new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions { foo = > new FoobarGenerator().Create(new Foo…

> Besides the deep learning part, this is already very much what working in C# and Visual Studio (Code) is like. Or any of the big 3 Java IDEs.

Or vim with a few plugins.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#168

Post by gwd » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 10:08 AM UTC

microcolonel wrote: post #149

gwd wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, the bandwidth chokepoint is organizing thoughts, and those thoughts into sentences (or into code snippets). Right, but particularly when writing, what "organizing thoughts" often looks like is writing a burst of text (a phrase or several sentences) then possibly editing it / deleting it / whatever. Being able to quickly bash out the bursts I think makes the whole process faster, or at least less annoying. I swi…

I switched much earlier, I learned Dvorak as a way to make a clean break when learning touch typing. I set up a little printout next to the computer and just forced myself to try remembering the correct finger movement for the key, then look at the printout, but never look at the keyboard. It took just a day or so of ordinary computer use to beat my non-touch-typing speed; and having learned also to touch type on QWE…

I had two one-semester typing classes in junior high school on QWERTY (with mechanical typewriters, no less), where I got up to 70 WPM on speed drills. Then in high school my mom got "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing", which got me up over 100 WPM on speed drills. A few years ago one of my friends introduced me to typeracer.com, where I consistently clocked between 110 and 120 WPM, still on QWERTY, on the default Dell keyboard that came with my workstation.

So I bought a mechanical keyboard and decided to switch to Colemak, which someone had mentioned on the site. But my numbers on typeracer still only hover around 100 typically, even after a few years of Colemak; presumably because I haven't been drilling the way I did when learning QWERTY. But my hands are certainly a lot more comfortable, and I'm pretty sure if I did drill I could surpass where I was before; so I don't regret the decision.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#169

Post by joe_the_user » Wed, Oct 14, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #159

joe_the_user wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "typing speed", do you mean copying an existing text? That's the usual measure. But in a world where most people compose their text on their own computers, how useful is it now? Or are you able to produce your writing/programming at that rate? If you can do that, you're in a remarkable category. My feeling is just moving your fingers to make word would be least impressive part of such a feat.

Or are you able to produce your writing/programming at that rate? If you can do that, you're in a remarkable category. It's the average speed at which people speak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Speech_and_li... Thus being able to type at that speed means IM conversations and such can be carried out "at the speed of thought".

I can't think of an instance where my 20-30 wpm typing held me back in a messenger chat - if anything, my typing speed in enough to present the other person with a wall of text, something to be avoided if you want to have a dialogue with someone.

And yeah, someone who speaks in full paragraph or essays is unusual. The average transcription of an extemporaneous speech shows a lot of "uh's", backtracking and so-forth.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#170

Post by boogies » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

alias-dev wrote: post #167

eitland wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Besides the deep learning part, this is already very much what working in C# and Visual Studio (Code) is like. Or any of the big 3 Java IDEs.

Or vim with a few plugins.

Or emacs, presumably (and TabNine supports “Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ Platform (IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, Android Studio, and others), Sublime Text, Vim, Vim (Deoplete), Vim (Coc), Emacs, Atom, [and] Jupyter Notebook”).