Ask HN: Tips/Places to learn to touch type properly

3 points by littlethrowaway 3 years ago | 4 comments

I've never really properly learned to touch type and I'd like to. I've spent time improving and then I just regress again. I'm definitely not good at numbers and symbols which is annoying for programming!

I've tried:

1. GNU typist -> https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/gtypist/gtypist.html

2. Keybr.com

gtypist I actually found OK, keybr seemed to get stuck and never gave me new letters (possibly I was doing something incorrectly).

Questions:

1. Do you have a decent program to recommend

2. Is it better to concentrate on accuracy first and then speed?

3. How to improve fast with "coding" type training?

Thanks! [edit formatting]

quincinia 3 years ago |

1. I recommend reading through [1]; it covers pretty much everything you will need. As for websites, I enjoy https://monkeytype.com/ because of how customizable it is. However if you're learning, I would recommend https://www.typingclub.com/ until you no longer need to look at the keyboard. This shouldn't take too long, you don't need to do all the modules. After that, you can pretty much ditch typingclub and focus on [monkeytype|typeracer|10fastfingers] for your practice.

2. Focus on accuracy always. Speed will come in time.

3. If you want to quickly improve your coding speed, turn on autocomplete. I know some people bind certain symbols to snippets/templates (eg. "par"/"rap" expands to "(" and ")"), but I think this is a little too much. I would recommend training on passages that have punctuation and special characters, but after a certain speed, typing symbols and numbers isn't that tight of a bottleneck unless that's all you're doing. You will get used to typing them with more practice anyway.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L-P68VDSGlpLM5A9tfRvWFoh...

toast0 3 years ago |

I learned with MicroType: The Wonderful World of PAWS [1], although Apple II has the bumps on the wrong keys.

There's also Mario Teaches Typing, where Mario starts talking a lot, but I couldn't get that to run last time I tried.

The Typing of the Dead and Typer Shark! are good too.

[1] https://archive.org/details/MicroTypeTheWonderfulWorldOfPaws...

schwartzworld 3 years ago |

I learned from Mavis Beacon, but I'm not sure you can run it on any modern platforms.

1970-01-01 3 years ago | |

Mavis Beacon is a great answer. Its still supported on modern systems. https://www.broderbund.com/mavis-beacon-teaches-typing-anniv...