Ask HN: How did you keep improving your typing speed after 100 WPM?
I type at 100+ WPM on a Laptop (Qwerty) keyboard (120+ on a nice cherry blue keyboard). I know many typists get faster than this. I practice on http://play.typeracer.com/ a bit, but it doesn't seem to improve my speed much.
I have no need to type faster than 100 words per minute, but I'm interested in how one would keep improving when all the learning resources are targeted at beginners.
40 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 85.4 ms ] threadI tried Dvorak for a couple of weeks and got to OK speeds, but in the end it wasn't worth throwing out the countless hours of experience with qwerty, or the slight discomfort of using other computers and having to switch mentally.
http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/#/load/VPDHWn6k
Over a lifetime that's a lot less wear on the hands and fingers.
Colemak is way easier to learn than Dvorak if you come from QWERTY. With Colemak, all special chars and some common shortcuts (undo, cut, copy, paste) are on the same key as on QWERTY.
I don't know if I'm faster with Colemak than I would be with QWERTY now for normal text, but it certainly feels smoother and more natural, if that makes sense.
Unrelated to Colemak: I wrote a typing game a few years ago. It's more "playful" than Typeracer and targeted at beginners. I don't think it will improve your typing speed past a certain level, but it should still be fun:
http://zty.pe
edit: wow -- really impressed. Very satisfying explosion animations and sounds.
So you might have abandoned it too soon.
The point was that with life-long auto-didact QWERTY skills, I don't use all my fingers, and my dominant hand actually covers slightly more area. Learning Dvorak from scratch bought me some discipline. Takeaway: Besides playing speed typing games, perhaps learn a new layout simply for the dexterity exercise.
You type at 100WPM. Unless you're transcribing can you really think at 100WPM?
I haven't measured it, but I think I type around 40 wpm (although adjusted much slower, I have poor typing accuracy) and I certainly don't feel like my typing slows me down, my typing more than keeps up with the speed of thought.
Maybe I just think really slowly.
But honestly, "Oh no I only type at <ludicrously fast speed>, what can I do to improve?" sounds a bit silly.
Ideally, I can measure my speech in wph.
I hesitated before posting this question because I thought many people might take it like you did. I'm happy to see that it's only 'throwawayReply', while others are being friendly and constructive :)
As I mentioned, I have no direct need to improve my typing speed. I find the fact that billions of humans sit in front of keyboards for many hours every day quite interesting. We've seen huge changes and improvements in text-entry over the last century, and it's one of history's little quirks that most of us still use a keyboard that was invented for typewriters. I'm interested in hearing other people's experiences, so I posted here to ask. If you're not interested in the topic, why did you take the time to click on the title (which is pretty self explanatory) and leave the disparaging comment? If you don't like this kind of content on HN (and think it "sounds a bit silly", downvote and move along :)
I have occasionally found that after having a sudden idea, sometimes in the heat of debate, that my fingers can't keep up with my brain. But yes, of course most of the time is still spent with my fingers poised while my brain works out what to type, and my primary motivation here is curiosity rather than desire for further efficiency.
maybe your brain just works slower, throwawayReply?
Maybe I can provide some advice. The most important thing is to type very quickly. Heated real-time chatroom activity (read: flamewars) are also helpful for honing this skill...
But chats might not be your thing. One other thing that might help is going to conferences and typing transcripts. Here's a few that I have done: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/ For example, this recently included a Bitcoin event where my typing was originally meant to be a community resource for after the event... but during the event this "resource" became a supplement to and alternative to live translation into Chinese (someone decided to throw it up on a projector while I was typing- no pressure): http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/2016-july-bitcoin-develope...
A long time ago I thought of myself as a keyboard snob, but the truth was that I hadn't tried that many keyboards. After experimenting with some expensive keyboards, I have found that for me the actual keyboard doesn't make too much of a difference, unless it's an exceptionally bad keyboard. I would recommend looking for keyboards that support n-key rollover, which would allow you to experiment with plover if you ever wanted to go in that direction for typing.
I use the default qwerty keyboard layout. It might be more productive to experiment with building alternative keyboards rather than changing keyboard layouts. Chording might be an interesting direction to pursue. Skip to using lots of MEMS accelerometer sensors and gyroscope sensors on a glove and get real-time motion capture of tiny finger motions. Use a few accelerometers per finger. You could spend a few hours making weird (easy) motions with your fingers, and then those state transitions could then be mapped to different symbols. You could also use a 3d model of the human hand, forearm and shoulder to compute the exact range of feasible and repeatable motions based on muscle anatomy, then sample from that range and assign symbols to different transitions.
Typing quickly isn't everything. It doesn't help you figure out what to say.
I gave it two modes: 1) show a new phrase to type and time the wpm. 2) of all already timed phrases, show the slowest one to be typed and timed again.
My observations were that you could in fact increase typing speed for certain areas of input, weak fingers or weak letter combinations.
Just showing the slowest phrase is very simplistic, but it does a surprisingly good job. You will only get to see a different phrase if you improved on the current one significantly and learned a new 'skill'. It also automatically does a form of spaced repetition as you normally only increase speed in small steps and will see slow phrases again and again.
It didn't bother me much to type in lots of phrases I was already fast at to single out the slow ones. But: after some playing around with it I saw that for many inputs it's mostly a concentration problem, less a finger-mechanical one.
How much C code can you type at 100 wpm before running out of things to type?
How much C code written by others can you read/parse at > 100 wpm before making a concentration lapse?
I haven't used the script in a while and went on to try to single out the slow patterns in every-day typing (mostly the error rate being to high) and then try to figure out why my fingers don't know where to go reliably. I then make an effort to train these patterns a little, maybe correcting an actual mistakes or lazyness in placement.
If you got to 100 wpm by that route all you can do is keep practising, maybe with a metronome. (Although that's going to be a horrible noise at that speed).
If you ever look at the keys that's going to slow you down, so use a cloth over your hands to hide the keys.
The other problem is that typing tests require you to read. Try typing some spoken word - try typing a podcast or radio show. You may find you type that faster.
You can teach yourself to use a stenography machine. You can build your own steno machine with some open-source software and a fancy gaming keyboard. See this video by Mirabai Knight and the Plover project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g
I wanted to try this but I couldn't stick with it.
Unfortunately I don't know of any tools that go much further than that in providing useful feedback.
That said, have you thought about taking up the piano? I feel like the dexterity that I develop playing the piano, particularly the ability to very quickly play repeated and alternating notes, has helped me to type faster. It should also help with rhythm, since piano keys need to be correct in both location and time to sound correct. If you're only interested in the effect on typing, you can avoid music with lots of chords and focus mostly on songs that have a quick tempo.