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A tool that increased my typing speed

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Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#41

Post by samatman »

taeric wrote: post #30
garaetjjte wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, QWERTY was designed to prevent jamming of early typewriters, allowing to type faster . http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-hidden-secrets-of...

This is a patato patahto thing. It would only jam if you went too fast, so the story goes. Get rid of the jamming, or force a max speed that is lower.

It's actually a critical distinction.

If QWERTY was designed to be the worst possible layout, to make typing slow in order to prevent jams, then now, with n-key rollover, we're all stuck with the worst possible layout.

If instead it was designed to be the most jam-free possible layout, with a secondary goal of being as fast as possible given that criterion, it's probably not that bad, and we'd live in a world where the fastest QWERTY typists aren't that much slower than the fastest typists, period.

And, in fact, we see that, while the world record was at one time held by a Dvorak typist, the prize at present belongs to QWERTY:

https://www.typing.com/blog/fastest-typists/

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#42

Post by mxcrossb »

My phone has predicted text on the top of the keyboard. I wonder if the secret is not a bunch of custom shortcuts, but a better mind-meld with the predicted text so that you the user hit the predicted value every time. You get the same speed and correctness benefits mentioned in the article.

But I’ve never seen a touch typing program which let’s you use the predicted text.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#43

Post by tartoran »

What about confusions regarding shortcuts that depend on the context? HW for hardware in CS or homework? We do use unexpanded shortcuts and out brain knows how to interpret them from the context. Adding shortucts like these in an editor to expand into words would create a lot of unnecessary problems and solutions IMO. Everybody knows for example that im not talking about the internatinal math olympiad here or internatioal money order. Acronyms in this case are a good example how the context create ambiguities if we dont know the context

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#45

Post by tartoran »

shock wrote: post #27

If you're on Linux and want to do this look for ibus-typing-booster. I submitted it 6 days ago, but it didn't get much attention. Unlike the author's method of manually setting up shortcuts for the most used words, ibus-typing-booster learns your most frequent words and then it's just a matter of typing a few chars followed by space, which inserts the whole word.

Im using notepad++ and it has this feature auto enabled by default but at a document level. I find that sometimes it helps but other times it really gets in my way. How does it work out for you with ibus-...-...?

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#47

Post by charles_f »

surfsvammel wrote: post #22

Record yourself writing, or programming, or whatever it is you do at the keyboard. You will see that it is not the speed of your typing that is the bottleneck, it is the creative process. You are not a mindless machine hacking away at the keyboard. And, if you are, then the life hack take away is to stop and think a bit before typing. Going slower often has lots of benefits.

That's true when doing creative work, but for other occasions, notably note taking, speed does matter.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#48

Post by llbeansandrice »

jbjbjbjb wrote: post #39
surfsvammel wrote: post #22

Record yourself writing, or programming, or whatever it is you do at the keyboard. You will see that it is not the speed of your typing that is the bottleneck, it is the creative process. You are not a mindless machine hacking away at the keyboard. And, if you are, then the life hack take away is to stop and think a bit before typing. Going slower often has lots of benefits.

Everyone says slow typing is ok but I also see a lot of people get frustrated at input lag when typing into a slow IDE

I feel like this is distinctly different though. If you're drawing/sketching, does it matter the speed at which you can draw? Now think about how much of an issue input lag is. It's obviously not exactly the same but I think it isolates why your personal typing speed and input lag are different things.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#49

Post by stevage »

samatman wrote: post #2

The legend of QWERTY being designed specifically to slow typists down will never die. It has that perfect "folk" quality, it should be true, the problem is simply that there isn't any evidence for it. What does stick out about QWERTY, is that you can type the word "typewriter" using only the top keys, a trick that made it easier for typewriter salesmen to memorize and demonstrate that little trick when selling their…

Well, there's two clear things about the layout of QWERTY:

1. TYPEWRITER on the top row. 2. DFGHJKL on the middle row, in perfect alphabetical order except for the two vowels that got moved to the top. (The French version has the M after the L).

It looks very much like they started with alphabetical order, then moved a couple of things.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#50

Post by stevage »

samatman wrote: post #41
taeric wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a patato patahto thing. It would only jam if you went too fast, so the story goes. Get rid of the jamming, or force a max speed that is lower.

It's actually a critical distinction. If QWERTY was designed to be the worst possible layout, to make typing slow in order to prevent jams, then now, with n-key rollover, we're all stuck with the worst possible layout. If instead it was designed to be the most jam-free possible layout , with a secondary goal of being as fast as possible given that criterion , it's probably not that bad, and we'd live in a world where…

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