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Typing Practice for Programmers

typing.io

81–90 of 224 posts

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#81

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).

yea, german keyboard here and it doesn't recognize my "=" ( so couldn't get past line one. Looks really cool though, I hope it gets I18lized sometime soon :) KeyboardJS has a basic locales mapping: https://github.com/RobertWHurst/KeyboardJS , Unfortunately it appears to only have en_US at the momment though

Unfortunatelly suffering from the same problems, as soon as I type : or ( or = or anything other than normal characters, I get errors. :( Cool typing experience other than that!

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#82

Why can't I share my test results on social networks? This is like one of the only types of social activites / games I would want to share with my friends! Other than that, this is freaking rad! I found it funny that I'm normally a 120-150 WPM typist, but when typing special characters for regex, etc, I hit a patch of molasses.

Currently there's an option to tweet your results after you finish any entire lesson. However, I will consider adding more sharing opportunities.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#84
post #4

Fun idea, but doesn't seem to recognize non-US keyboard layouts.

Thanks for the bug report. The next update will fix international keyboard layouts once I figure out the mess that is cross-browser, cross-language javascript key event handling:)

I'm using a standard Brazilian keyboard. The colon was mapped to the US layout location, but I could not type {, even though I knew the location on a US layout. Maybe because that key is a dead key here.

I would be very glad if there were an "ignore layout" option that dropped support for any layout difference, so I could type as in a US layout and at least finish the exercises.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#85
post #31
post #24

Why do you want me to sign in with Google?

You would prefer Facebook or Twitter? Or that they implement yet another authentication scheme and store their own accounts and credential database? There's no free lunch. The OAuth providers are, on balance, pretty good at what they do and a better choice for account management at small sites. This one happened to pick Google.

I think github is a nice choice for a site like this, you could even do a rudimentary look through their public repositories to see what languages they generally use and give targeted examples.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#87
For the most part I like it, but there's a performance issue that actually affects usability. The first time you start a lesson, the editor is really snappy, but with each successive lesson, the scroll speed gets slightly slower, and a few lessons in, the entered text is just a blur, and you can't even see a cursor. This means that when you make a mistake, it's hard to tell how far you've backspaced, and I ended up bogged down in error correction loops.

I don't have anything more specific to add than that it seems to get worse over time.

Otherwise, awesome idea!

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#88
I'm one of those folks who is on the top-end of crazy-stupid-fast typing, but hadn't ever seen a typing test that actually had typing code, so this is absolutely awesome for seeing the difference in speed between prose and code. However, the fading in and out cursor makes it extremely difficult to track where I am, particularly when going back to correct a mistake I made (I know I hit the wrong key, and depending on where in the typing I hit it, I'll need to see how far back to go). It's also exceedingly annoying when it blurs across multiple characters.

I personally would prefer a side-by-side text entry, rather than typing on top of existing code, so it's easy to see progress and mistakes (even if you don't highlight mistakes in the text).

EDIT: It looks like about 50 words per minute, maybe 55, is the max speed you can type and have the cursor actually be visible enough to be a guide of where you are in the text.

Re: Typing Practice for Programmers

#89
post #48
post #25

This. Is. AWESOME. Let me tell you what this is useful for by telling you my story: I'm a pretty fast typist (80-100WPM on TypeRacer, usually) and I really never put much thought into my typing, since it was good enough. But I recently started paying attention to the kinds of mistake I make on Typeracer, and realized that I have certain combinations of keys which I don't make using the "home row" of the keyboard, but…

I learned that I NEVER type '}'

What? how? Its in almost every programming language that I can think of.
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