I’m constantly amazed at people who work with a computer every day, several hours per day, much of it typing in text, but don’t know how to type. You’ve seen it: hands happily waving above the keyboard, twin index fingers scanning the rows of plastic keys, sometimes pecking at one; head bowed down, eyes fixed at the keyboard only to occasionally glance up at the screen to check the results.
Of course, I’m not the only one to have observed this.
I was an OK typist already as a kid. I remember taking a typing class, in the ninth grade I think, and scoring a straight A without even trying (or a 10 actually, the Finnish school grade system goes from 4 to 10). My friends also marveled at my typing speed. Regardless of this, I had bad typing habits. For one thing, I was looking at the keyboard a lot. Then at high school I got a new friend who was, to my great frustration, even faster than me. He knew touch typing. I didn’t even know what the little raised dots on F and J were for.
During the first year at the university I decided to finally do something about my typing. Unlearning my old typing method turned out to be really hard. I would always just fall back to my old ways, because that’s what I had been doing for ten years, and it was just so much easier. At some point, it dawned on me that I would have to start from scratch: I would have to learn to type with a non-qwerty keyboard layout. My old skills would be useless on the new layout, so I would be forced to relearn.
At the time, most of the writing I did was either in Finnish or program code, so Dvorak didn’t seem like an optimal choice. If I would have to learn a whole new layout, why not make something that would be perfect for me? So, I wrote a small program which captured all my key presses and kept it running for a week or so. Then I wrote a program which analyzed all the data, gathered the most common chords of two and three letters, and arranged they keys on the keyboard in an optimal way.
This is what my program made for me:
Changing the keyboard layout turned out to work wonderfully. I couldn’t fall back to my old qwerty skills anymore, and started making real progress with touch typing. Within a couple of weeks, I was up to my old typing speed. After a couple of months I was already faster.
I still use this layout.
Nowadays I can easily reach 85-90 words per minute cold, typing in unfamiliar English text. In my first language, which is Finnish, I’m probably somewhat faster, at least when counting cpm and not wpm. The fun part is that I have a keyboard layout nobody else in the known universe can use. It’s kinda fun to let a coworker sit at my computer and watch them fumble.
How did you learn touch typing? Or do you still look at your keyboard?
Related posts:
If you liked this, click here to receive new posts in a reader.
You should also follow me on Twitter here.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Care to share the program, or should we all try writing our own? :D
Kudos for jumping the qwerty ship, although I really don’t mind using dvorak for programming (most words can be autocompleted, so you end up typing symbols much of the time; there’s no good layout compromise between coding and writing :[ ).
I’ll try to dig it up. It’s been… 14 years or so, but I’ve always been quite religious about backups and archiving old stuff, so I might just find it. I remember it was written in Perl.
Unfortunately, I cannot find the code anywhere. I did find all sorts of other interesting things I had forgotten about, but not the layout optimizer. You’ll have to either do with dvorak, or write your own optimizer…