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A tool that increased my typing speed

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Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#81

Post by Multicomp »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #75
copperx wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking is faster than typing. Speech recognition is my go-to for writing prose these days.

Do you have any particular software you recommend for Speech recognition? Do you know of any software that can cope with programming language syntax without introduced a tonne of dictation errors?

Last year, I used nuance dragon professional individual 15 for completing nanowrimo with ywriter 5 and an old work hand-me-down headset (Jabra Pro 9450 or thereabouts).

Over 98% of the prose was written by voice, and because of the headset's wireless range, I was able to wander around the house while thinking about what to say, with dragon happily riding down what I said and easily letting me correct when it made mistakes. I got very good at saying "full stop new paragraph" or, "select line, quote that, go back" to quote lines of dialogue. I expected to have to learn a million commands by rote memorization, but it seems like it became second nature within a day or two for first draft noveling purposes, I have no doubt that medical or legal uses have more advanced commands, but for writing a 50,000 plus word draft it was fine.

If you don't want to pay $300 for nuance dragon, I got scarily good results from trying out Microsoft office online word dictation via office 365 about 2 months ago via a $60 bluetooth headset for wfh.

I won't rely on the latter service myself because it is not offline speech recognition, and can be taken away at the flip of a switch, but for trying out if speech recognition is worth it for you to pay $200 on eBay or $300 in the store for dragon, it is certainly a useful feature to get off the ground.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#82

Post by abecedarius »

mxcrossb wrote: post #42

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.

I suspect the key is to somehow make it really quick and easy to retroactively fix mispredictions and other mistakes. That'd open up the space for more aggressive guess-what-I-mean input methods.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#83

Post by userbinator »

sebmellen wrote: post #74
userbinator wrote: post #68

My average typing speed is ~140-150WPM and I can go over 200 in short bursts. I've only used QWERTY. Thus I don't think Dvorak or any of the other layouts has that much of an advantage. However, I think the design of the keyboard's switches makes a huge difference; I can only reach those speeds on the keyboard I normally use, which is a pretty generic one with rubber domes, but where ~2mm of travel is enough to regis…

Would you have a link to your keyboard? I'm looking for one just like that, after having used a mechanical keyboard much like the one you described for a while.

Unfortunately, the only search result for the model number (KM-2601P)... is the HN post where I last mentioned it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774137

I don't know much about its history, other than the fact that it was a cheap "freebie" from a PC long ago that I continued to use because it felt great to type on. It was probably manufactured in the late 90s.

The Internet is horribly forgetful and certainly not the treasure-trove of information it used to be: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#84

Post by yumcimil »

dnautics wrote: post #17

Having used it for 20 years now... I don't find that dvorak improves my typing speed. If anything it probably net reduces my productivity since often I'm hitting paste (ctrl-v) and I miss and hit exit window (ctrl-x). However, I like it because it feels comfortable typing in it, way more so than qwerty.

Yeah, I think this was probably the only thing. My hands felt slightly less tired after a lot of typing. I was about the same speed as qwerty, which was already decently fast.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#86

Post by 1123581321 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #69
1123581321 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone’s words are equally valuable. Someone who does not vomit but actually has things worth saying, and a limited time in which to express them, would benefit from faster typing. Worst case, it’s nice to get one’s job done faster to make time for other things. You can always take your hands off the keyboard periodically if you want to write less.

I grew up back when typing was a skill. A good typist could type at about 60 words per minute. Such typing was always to either to copy a written text or to take dictation. I think it's extraordinarily rare to find someone who could write down their thoughts at that rate, even if they'd thought out a text beforehand. I only learned to type at about 20-30 words per minute, still faster than many now but slow the measu…

That is true for many, and even 20wpm is overkill for some applications such as editing poetry. Fast typing is not a widespread skill.

However, some do benefit from the increased speed, some increase the speed of their thinking to match their potential output. Others benefit from the reduced delay between thinking and writing or editing a thought, analogous in software to working with a fast compile time or a dynamic repl.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#87

Post by jeffbee »

stevage wrote: post #50
samatman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 hassle to type "the", especially considering that you'll be holding down shift, which should itself be somewhere hard to reach, such as where 6 usually goes.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#88

Post by 1123581321 »

bonestormii_ wrote: post #65
1123581321 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with most of this. These skills may be worth the time tradeoff to learn. They don’t increase the error rate. They can be learned during unproductive time (I learned Dvorak on conference calls at an old job.) They can be picked up and used marginally for immediate small gains with potential to improve over time (Vim is like this, not that I use it much.) Many programmers work in a couple bread-and-butter en…

Words are already extremely cheap and effortless though, and saying that they have a higher value than I appraise them for doesn't address some of the issues I addressed, such as the very real problem on non-universal configurations. If you want to spend your time that way, that's cool with me. I like vim. Such things have their place. Personally, I suspect this doesn't solve any problems I have.

Your other issues were also addressed, the non-universal configurations by pointing out most people work in one or two environments most of the time. Worst case, it’s hard to imagine a quick disabling of conflicting macros being too large a price to work quickly in an environment for weeks or years.

I do concede this doesn’t solve any problems of yours as you don’t value what you do with your keyboard very much.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#89

Post by irjustin »

Why bring the whole Devorak part into the article? Also, I'm surprised the author didn't go pure stenograph then because that's way faster.

WPM is only a good measure of WPM.

The best coders don't need to type faster. The best writers still hand write things or type on DOS[0]. Once you hit a baseline competency, other areas of improvement/reward far outweigh the time devoted than to a better WPM.

Wanting to type faster is fine, but do not mix it with being more effective aside from being a great typist.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg&feature=emb_titl...

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#90

Post by jeffbee »

dnautics wrote: post #17

Having used it for 20 years now... I don't find that dvorak improves my typing speed. If anything it probably net reduces my productivity since often I'm hitting paste (ctrl-v) and I miss and hit exit window (ctrl-x). However, I like it because it feels comfortable typing in it, way more so than qwerty.

Why don't you remap the clipboard combos to their usual places?
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