A tool that increased my typing speed(vasilishynkarenka.com) |
A tool that increased my typing speed(vasilishynkarenka.com) |
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
As a reasonably fast touch typist for many years, I found that for prose it was basically no change. But. There were enough things that were a total drag that I couldn't keep using it.
There are times when the key you need to hit isn't part of a flow, and you have to hit it perfectly: passwords, Illustrator/Photoshop commands, punctuation-heavy inputs like URLs, postal addresses, etc. I'm not a programmer, and others will have other things they do.
So, I bought normal keycaps and replaced them on just the letter and number keys. Much better.
"sout" extends to System.out.println
;)
Then they went on a wild crazy tangent into pop psychology, and, uh...no thank you.
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 inevitable tsunami of errors you make in the learning process? Are these neural pathways more valuable than say, learning a new language or practicing a different skill?
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.
For vim to become worth your time to learn to use effectively, you have to have a purpose to use it quite a lot. But it takes quite a lot of time, and causes quite a lot of errors in the mean time. Eventually, you are left with a skill and a tool that are a pleasure to use, but you literally must spend time actively learning how to use it. You cannot just pick it up, because you need to first memorize key combinations and the behavior of various modes. Then, you need to actually practice them.
And this proposed solution is even worse, because it suffers not only from the "vim effect", but from the "vim config effect", where you not only need to memorize, and practice, but actively configure your custom solution, which can take tons of time; is subject to loss/deletion; and is not universally available.
And god help me, what about programming? I honestly do not want to even think about multi-layered completions wreaking their havoc on everything I write, and the only alternative is different completions for different types of environments--even more cognitive load.
This seeks efficiency as represented by speed, but ignores efficiency as represented by ubiquity, generality, and low cognitive load.
If I want to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, it is more efficient to run. If I want to get from point A to point B with the minimum energy expenditure, it is more efficient to walk. To be truly efficient, you need smart, balanced goals.
I only learned to type at about 20-30 words per minute, still faster than many now but slow the measure of typists, and that's easily fast enough to keep up with my thoughts.
But the sustained part matters there. Personally, my desire to write long-form text is extremely bursty.
If I'm making notes during a discussion, I might not write anything for a considerable time. However, when an important point is made, I want to record it as quickly and passively as possible, so I can stay connected to whatever else is being said.
If I'm thinking deeply about something, again I might not write anything for a long time. Then if the idea I've been searching for all week clicks, I might make a lot of notes over the next couple of minutes, while the line of reasoning is completely clear in my mind.
I type English text at a comparable speed to a professional secretary, but a way of recording important thoughts even faster when I encounter them would be valuable to me. The same goes for concepts that aren't plain English, too, such as code, mathematics or some sort of diagram.
If your REPL loop[1] gets faster by increasing your typing speed, can you get more of your ideas out there whether you're a blogger, author or coder?
[1] read-eval-print-loop^2
I'm really not convinced Dvorak intrinsically speeds up typing
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 wares. And we do have evidence that this motivated the layout.
http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-hidden-secrets-of...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-...
It seems likely the keyboard layout was the result of working with typists to develop the best layout.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 might only be accuracy, which can boost output.
Right, but particularly when writing, what "organizing thoughts" often looks like is writing a burst of text (a phrase or several sentences) then possibly editing it / deleting it / whatever. Being able to quickly bash out the bursts I think makes the whole process faster, or at least less annoying.
I switched from QWERTY to Colemak several years ago; I'm not sure I've gotten back up to my previous top typing speed, but it's certainly a lot more comfortable.
It took just a day or so of ordinary computer use to beat my non-touch-typing speed; and having learned also to touch type on QWERTY I can say Dvorak is more comfortable, and looks/feels more graceful, for whatever that's worth.
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.
¹https://wiki.debian.org/XCompose
²You can make this quite convenient with xcape:
setxkbmap -option compose:sclk && xcape -e "Shift_L=Multi_key"However, I like it because it feels comfortable typing in it, way more so than qwerty.
But I agree with you completely - Colemak is way more comfortable to type in than QWERTY. Way fewer hand movements and less finger stretching for common bigrams. My non-scientifically based hope is that it’ll reduce RSI in the long run. No regrets after 10ish years
BTW on MacOS there is a Dvorak mode that uses QWERTY when the command key is down!
With MacOS, I use the DV+QW layout where the layout is QWERTY if you're holding down Cmd. So Cmd+V etc work just like on a QWERTY keyboard. It's a pretty good compromise.
While I don't see myself moving back, I never recommend switching to others.
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.
My finger placement is wrong, I don't type in the "correct way". But the typing course was graded on reaching X WPM with no errors, which I could easily surpass. The teacher allowed me to pass with that. Now I still don't place my fingers correctly and I can type about 152WPM with 100% accuracy (just tested on https://monkey-type.com/).
I could imagine myself using this method when I think about the _tens of minutes_ of my life I've probably saved now by just making "@@" a shortcut for my email address.
Unfortunately, like Dvorak, which the author also proposes, it has the "doesn't work on my friend's computer" problem. Although, maybe a little easier to untrain your fingers from than Dvorak...
Not affiliated, just a happy user.
As I've gotten older, I find this situation almost never comes up. Occasionally in some workplaces you are temporarily using someone else's computer. In which case, you either fall back to QWERTY, or take the 60 seconds to add Dvorak to their machine.
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.
More thoughts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702678.
So a bit a predictive typing assistance and customizations.
"Here are some ideas for reflection shortcuts that I use:
“wam”—“Why am I feeling this way?”
“wwl”—“What went well?”
“wcb”—What could have gone better?"
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-l...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-...
But I’ve never seen a touch typing program which let’s you use the predicted text.
Weird, I can’t seem to find the M key to the right of my L. (Not that the resemblance isn’t clear, but that’s not the only difference and they did say “exact same”).
I really think a portion of kids that grew up playing RuneScape got a bit of head up over peers. I know it's led to me never having been scammed more than once and starting a successful business at a very young age. Shame what happened to the game, but I guess all good things must die.
Here's the previous discussion (40 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702678
The "feature" that is built-in into most IDEs and most programmers are using on daily basis, e.g. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/using-live-templates.htm...
I really don't want to be that guy, but the typing with 3x speed certainly didn't helped the article to be concise and to the point.
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 register a keypress, and the keyfeel is very light and bouncy. Before that I used a mechanical keyboard with (very) clicky Blue ALPS (https://deskthority.net/wiki/Alps_SKCM_Blue ) switches, and struggled to reach 120WPM. Other keyboards I've tried timing typing speed on include a Thinkpad X60 (can barely exceed 100, but quickly tiring), Apple low-profile (80-90, very tiring), and the famous IBM Model M (75-80, impressively loud and extremely tiring.)
Or are you able to produce your writing/programming at that rate? If you can do that, you're in a remarkable category. My feeling is just moving your fingers to make word would be least impressive part of such a feat.
As an analogy-- plenty of people can play their instrument while they improvise the next bar in their head.
Try it! Transcribe the words I've written here and while thinking about the weather.
But there are often times where I'm struck with a particularly well-crystallized thought, and typing speed becomes a huge bottleneck in recording its structure before the thought dissolves back into the ether of conceptual soup in my brain.
Dvorak with vim isn't that bad. HJKL is in a row on QWERTY, but Dvorak at least has JK together, and H to the left of L.
CUA keybindings like Ctrl X, Ctrl C, Ctrl P can be a pain with Dvorak. (I also don't think shortcuts like Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Insert are widely supported across OSs, nor USB HID's copy and paste keys).
Other than that, it's just about remembering the shortcut by the letters, not by the position of the keys.
That being said, this year I decided enough was enough, and I worked to relearn QWERTY. Initially it was really hard, but after a few weeks, I managed to get to a comfortable speed. Here is an image showing my QWERTY averages since March of this year: https://i.imgur.com/RESfuFS.png My average has plateau'd around 80wpm, which is a great speed, and I managed to do that without sacrificing my Dvorak speed, which sits at 125wpm. Finally, to throw a wrench into it, I also decided to learn Colemak this year... and with enough practice I've gotten to the point where I can switch between the three without any issue.
I hardly ever type on a Qwerty keyboard though.
It's the average speed at which people speak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Speech_and_li...
Thus being able to type at that speed means IM conversations and such can be carried out "at the speed of thought".
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
They also without much evidence reject idea that TYPEWRITER ending up on same row was intentional design, but curiously enough [2] calculated odds of that occurring randomly as about 1 in 2500, so it might have been.
[0] https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433...
[1] http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-hidden-secrets-of...
[2] https://cyber.sci-hub.se/MTAuMTAxNi9qLnJlc3BvbC4yMDEzLjAzLjA...
So I bought a mechanical keyboard and decided to switch to Colemak, which someone had mentioned on the site. But my numbers on typeracer still only hover around 100 typically, even after a few years of Colemak; presumably because I haven't been drilling the way I did when learning QWERTY. But my hands are certainly a lot more comfortable, and I'm pretty sure if I did drill I could surpass where I was before; so I don't regret the decision.
I use this setup + qwerty in an azerty region, needless to say my setup does not get used a lot for pair programming. I actually did have a spare keyboard in my desk drawer for a long time just in case someone really wanted to use my machine before I went full-time WFH.
"As needed" I would say around the 2 year mark, but with a bit of a blip to think about it.
But I could do this at the 6 month mark, just not accurately.. I would still be messing up letters at a ~1% rate, let's say.
I thought most machines could do multiple things at once?
Humans barely walk and talk at the same time, and stumble much more likely than when not talking.
As someone who plays piano, you have to spend years perfecting it so it becomes automatic enough to offload your brain and only then you can improvise while playing. Your movements have migrated to a "fast" part of your brain. If you record yourself and listen to it, it's a whole different thing, you feel as if your ears were blocked to the melody, only listening enough to improvise the next key, and so on.
I am pretty sure, but to lazy to find sources which I know there are plenty, that Multitasking always yields worse quality results than doing one task. If you don't care about quality, then why don't you practice your dance moves as you write and think, as well?
If you're not doing something 100%, then you're half-assing two things.
And yeah, someone who speaks in full paragraph or essays is unusual. The average transcription of an extemporaneous speech shows a lot of "uh's", backtracking and so-forth.
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.
They can certainly type faster than the average 50-year old, but they can't touch type (or only partially).
It's odd that in the day and age of a lot of computer related work we don't teach touch-typing in schools anymore.
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.
To get to
> new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions { foo = 3 });
, the keystrokes would be more like
< new Fo<tab><enter>
> new FoobarGenerator()
< .Cr<tab><enter>
> new FoobarGenerator().Create(
< new<tab><enter>
> new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions
< { f<tab><enter>
> new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions { foo =
< 3 } );
> new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions { foo = 3 });
Although this was not a great experience on my already slow two core macbook.
The results were pretty amazing though.
The good news is, dragon appears to to learn which of the two word variations you use more often and begins to weight its word recognition towards those cases instead.
Everything you wrote about considering tradeoffs is sound, but is being misapplied because you’re overestimating the difficulty and underestimating the benefit due to placing too low a value on words.
Personally, the best tool for typing productivity I ever have used is a keyboard with no letters on the key caps. It also means I'm the only person in my immediate circle that can use my computer at all. My wife literally can't use my PC.
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.
I do concede this doesn’t solve any problems of yours as you don’t value what you do with your keyboard very much.
Nano probably works too but I'm not nearly as proficient in it, so... vim!
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:
As per the claim of the fastest typist. I would be shocked it steno doesn't win that, hands down.
Edit: Added in "because you are typing too fast", which was part of the original claim. I should have noted I don't know if I believe it, but I did want to raise that something that makes you go as fast as you can by keeping you from going too fast, both slows you down and makes you type faster. At the same time.
Weird thing in these discussions is considering that most jam-free possible layout and as fast as possible was somehow different design goal. But, in world of early mechanical typewriters, it was the same! You couldn't have "fast" layout that jammed because it wouldn't be fast, and if you had jam-free layout it probably was fast, because it weren't forcing you to depress each key completely before pressing next.
The system described in the OP text is a form of stenography, conducted with a normal keyboard. I would be surprised if a competition typist, presented with an already-shortened text, couldn't beat out most stenotype stenographers working off the original text.
It would be unfair for a typing competition to exclude a chorded keypad, and I don't know of they do or not. It's completely fair to not accept "ts cmptly fr" as the transcription of "it's completely fair", no matter how it's typed in.
Efficiency for me is not the same as efficiency for you. Deal with it.
I'll also add that something like vim is specialized and very useful. It is easier to use vim in a mouseless environment, which is sometimes a necessity. I use it fairly well, and it has paid dividends on the time invested. I can appreciate the value of a good tool.
But typing speed is not the same as efficiency because standards are efficient in their own way. I'm sure you'll say "oh, you don't value words and have nothing important to say", but that's a ridiculous argument. It is simply that, in my opinion, this type of thing is not worth the overhead it creates, much like extremely customized vim configs. Time is invested in the pursuit of efficiency, and it is never returned. One day the config ceases to function correctly, or your friend/coworker/family member tries to use the keyboard and can't use it effectively, so it gets disabled.
So... yeah, it is somewhat convoluted, but not as much as you seem to be implying. Take "kids chopsticks". They speed up kids, obviously. They slow down folks that know what they are going.
(Really, I could probably list a huge list of things that all work in this vein.)
That all said, I confess I don't buy many of the benefits of alternative keyboards. I switched to colemak about a year ago and I think I am still below the speed I was at qwerty. Significantly so.
Of course, I don't know that this has had a major impact on my speed of getting things done. Plenty of other obstacles there.
Yes, and I in fact said the same thing in the post you're replying to.
Typing competitions have existed for far longer than personal computers, and the value of typing fast was being able to produce a complete typewritten document. Steno machines coexisted, and had their own competitions, so the parameters of these things were set before it became possible to 'reconstitute' stenography into full text on an automatic basis.
All games have rules, and they're always somewhat-to-completely arbitrary. An "open category" would reduce to whomever can talk fastest, since text transcription is a basically solved problem and the sound sample can be slowed until it's in the pocket for the transcribing software to work on it. Steve Woodmore can articulate 637 words per minute: no one is touching that with their fingers.
I get that most forum posts are point counterpoint things. That said, it isn't the only way, is it?
I'm curious how true it is that text transcription is solved. Judging from how badly my home speakers with at times, I'm sceptical. This is especially true in most environments with many people talking. Just getting a "stop" in while my kids are in the room is already difficult.
Edit: I see my mistake. I should have said "it is indeed an adhoc shorthand". I did not mean to make it like I was introducing the point.
'solved' in that, when I say something complex to my phone, it does get it right, although there is a problem of the long tail of proper nouns: I live in Hawaii, and it has real problems with the place names around here, can't pronounce them either. I'd say it's well past 99% and will only improve: it correctly handled the sentence "voice transcription is approximately as robust as stenography", which doesn't make the sentence true but is suggestive.
I guess my point was that it's easy to recognize that voice transcription is 'not typing', and stenography just isn't typing in the same way: there's software between the actual transcript and the final, legible text, which lets it be faster.
Steno would be pretty useless for me as a coder, though I do use snippets, which are kind of the same thing if you squint.
