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A tool that increased my typing speed

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Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#91

Post by melling »

jowsie wrote: post #16
jamesfe wrote: post #10

The author proposes that we're somehow blocked from success because we can't type fast enough. Is that true? I don't agree; in fact, I'd rather be concise and communicate well than vomit more words onto the screen. Additionally, beyond Dvorak, is there a better way to increase typing speed than spending what must be hours and hours building a bespoke solution for each one of your machines? And what is the cost of the…

There's always stenography http://www.openstenoproject.org/

For programming, we should be trying to type less. Tools like TabNine should help:

https://www.tabnine.com/

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#92

Post by dnautics »

pascoej wrote: post #73
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.

This has been my experience as well. Using a non-qwerty layout is an annoyance when I use somebody else's computer or somebody else uses mine. While I don't see myself moving back, I never recommend switching to others.

I dunno, it was a pretty enlightening experience, learning how to struggle, learning how to be humble about sucking at something that for me till then was super basic (as an adult, so I could really savor the feeling -- I had learned to touch-type at age six). If you don't forget qwerty, it's not an annoyance to use someone else's keyboard. And having someone else be annoyed when they use my keyboard is a feature =).

The only time it was mildly annoying was when I started dating someone and asked to use her laptop, and I suddenly found I couldn't type. It turned out that she had ALSO learned dvorak in college. When I realized what was going on it was all good.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#93

Post by emerged »

irjustin wrote: post #89

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 fast…

If efficiency is the goal, it's better to spend time optimizing your ability to use advanced text editing features. Simultaneously modifying multiple lines at once, block based editing / copy+pasting, regexes, etc. I'd imagine the amount of time I'm actually typing is well under 1% of my time as an engineer.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#94

Post by bemmu »

userbinator wrote: post #66
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.

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…

Kind of like build time. Even with only a small fraction of time spent compiling, it can distract you and make it less enjoyable to code vs. seeing your changes instantly.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#95

Post by gdx »

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…

Anecdotically, QWERTY also seems to be sort of arranged in alphabetical order but with certain keys moved here and there — for exemple, the middle row is:

A .. D . F G H . J K L

(dots indicating the missing letters.)

Then it goes down for the M N from right to left, up for O P, then the top row is:

Q R . T U

And the bottom row is, from right to left:

V . X . Z

And then the rest.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#96

Post by thotsBgone »

MAGZine wrote: post #7

The problem for me is rarely typing speed, unless if I'm transcribing something. No, the bandwidth chokepoint is organizing thoughts, and those thoughts into sentences (or into code snippets). It is always nice to be able to express things as quickly as possible, but I'm not sure how much this might actually speed someone up (practically) past a certain threshold (say, 70wpm). The biggest thing that comes to mind mig…

To me, typing speed is a convenience feature, not an efficiency feature (past like 30 wpm). I have recently twice experienced both low typing speeds (~30 wpm) and high typing speeds (~80 wpm) due to switching to colemak and to an ortholinear keyboard layout, and my productivity was the same on 30 wpm but man did it feel shitty.

I ended up typing less comments on sites like HN and typing in less detail to people on Discord. The increased convenience of having a higher WPM makes you want to write/communicate more, in my experience.

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#98

Post by thotsBgone »

dnautics wrote: post #18
lukehutch wrote: post #3

I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout 20 years ago (in the middle of a mission-critical project, no less), and not only doubled my typing speed, but significantly reduced arm/finger strain. Once you put in the 3-ish weeks to retrain your brain, and get back to at least your original typing speed, you'll never go back to QWERTY.

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?

Re: A tool that increased my typing speed

#100

Post by quickthrower2 »

irjustin wrote: post #89

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 fast…

There is a point around 200wpm (?) that I think would be very handy to be able to "type" this fast, using shorthand or whatever. This where you can keep up taking notes when talking to someone but also take in the subject matter. Being able to do that all at once and then have those notes to refer to would be very useful.

A lot of time is wasted by not having a record of things.

Maybe "AI" would be just as good as solving this problem though.

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