My parents forced me to take typing lessons on typewriters in the 90s and I am thankful they did, of course that had some technical limitations in regard to speed but it definitely made me a great blind typist which is the main foundation for typing fast in my opinion.
Some years later in school I also had a typing class at some point and the teachers thought I cheated because of my high scores so I had to take the test again with multiple teachers hovering over my shoulder – I scored slightly higher then.
I'm usually around 120wpm, which I know is not even a great score amongst typist but it's more than enough for me. I couldn't play the game due to an injury right now unfortunately, but I did click through it and agree with others that I prefer practising words or sentences - plus the letters appearing on different spots on the screen is annoying to me because that's not how I type, so I'm not sure if this is really great for typing practice (for me, at least) – but it could be good at becoming faster at blind typing maybe?
>My parents forced me to take typing lessons on typewriters in the 90s
same for me as well. I was originally only going to take a single semester, but wound up taking the second semester as well. The first semester was all "A space S space D space F space" and gaining the muscle memory on how to type. Probably one of the single most useful courses in school for my everyday use. The second semester was much more focused on being an executive assistant with emphasis on how to properly format documents and that kind of thing. Easy-A GPA padding course, but I didn't complain too much since it was one of those classes where I was the only male in the class. They started us off on the older clackity-clack style arms, but if you became fast enough to out type the machine, you could progress to a speedball.
It's all fun and games until it's code. I barely clear 50 wpm on that, and I know where every key is without looking. I actually dread typing those 3-10 lines on that test, which is how I know I could use more practice, but can't find the time for it.
neat idea, but horrendous font selection. the upper case "I" in deletedIds is indistinguishable from lower case "L". also, didn't like the feel of typos. typically, I know when I make a typo and immediately hit the delete key to fix it. the fact that there's no indication of the typo visually other than the highlight stops progressing is counter-intuitive. I would much rather see the incorrect chars typed as is but then maybe have the highlighting change color. also agree with a sibling comment about unnecessary white spaces, while the writing code in a minimized format is also counter intuitive. hitting enter at line endings is muscle memory just as much as cmd-s/ctrl-s after completing blocks is for me.
edit: after taking the first attempt and then writing this post, I went back to try it again. It said 6 wpm. Tried it again, and it said 5 wpm. That's clearly BS. I thought the first one was an accidental key press that started the timer while I made my comment here. But after restarting it to get an even slower ridiculously wrong time just really makes me mad I wasted my time.
Fine I'll try despite having a painful hand right now, my WPM mention was not coding specific btw but I am always happy to help a throwaway account;
I got "You can type 80 words per minute", and slightly more pain now.
The biggest thing that got me here is that it doesn't match my coding style and especially whitespace at line endings were annoying. Also I'm on the couch on my laptop, not behind proper desk.
For me, the excessive spacing makes this pretty painful. If we need a whitespace buffer inside every set of parentheses, I'd expect the IDE to do it for me.
2) Thank god for autocompletion and other things IDEs do to save you from typing so much
3) It's weird and unnatural that the test requires so much whitespace.
4) This reaffirms my decision to get myself a keyboard kit like the Elora or Lily58. Main benefits being the otholinear layout and moving the mod keys and others like ([{}]) to the thumbs or other more ergonomic positions.
I got 33, would probably have got a couple more on a programming language/style I'm familiar with instead of whatever that is. (Spaces on the inside of round brackets? Empty bracket pairs with a space between them? No space between if and the opening bracket? Madness.)
I got 62 then tried again and got 63. Seems to be about where I'm at for programming stuff. I will say that the style of code is slightly different than my own coding style which seemed to also hamper me a bit.
That is not a great test. Maybe it's just me but I don't often write code with the proper code style (or even semi-colons depending on the language) and let the IDE handle all of that.
I self learned to type using "Iankey"[0] (the manual[1]). In my opinion, it is one of the best training tools I tried - I should search around my old backups to see if I can still find it.
One thing I've been looking for (and would pay money for) is a tool/game that helps me improve my typing speed in real-world scenarios, especially writing code and/or editing documents.
I purchased a subscription to keybr,[0] and it's pretty nice, but it assumes you're always typing brand new text linearly. There's no way to practice things like jumping to a previous line, jumping to the beginning of a line, deleting a word.
I recently switched to a Kinesis Advantage keyboard (my first mechanical keyboard), and I was able to build muscle memory for the standard letter and number keys in a few days, but I'm still trying to get comfortable with control keys, arrow keys, and Home/End/Del in real-world flows.
What a wild world. I also just got a kinesis keyboard, and pay for keybr.com but i have the freestyle2 the one that is split down the middle. I've made it to X but would really like to get my speed up on the number keys and function keys too. Good luck!
The Kinesis Advantage is a great keyboard. Reduced pain from RSI for me.
One thing to be aware of is being able to easily remap keys or set key combos. I rarely use the native Home/End/Del keys after that, because they are more awkward to get my thumb to.
For better or worse I configured mine for an optimized keylayout (RSNTB ,AEIH on the homerow). I’ve got it in muscle memory but wondering how many days it will take to get past this ~30 wpm plateau.
What made me very fast was playing MUDs during high school (25+ years ago, and specifically Arctic MUD, http://mud.arctic.org/ ). Have to type fast or your character is going to die.
Once you get used to it, an ergonomic keyboard helps a lot to speed up typing as well.
Ha, same thing here. I distinctly remember my fingers moving of their own accord hours after I stopped playing, as I worked out what I was going to do the next day. I played on a BBS, and we only had 30 minutes a day, so I would rehearse for it.
I've found that learning to type fast using individual keys doesn't work for me. Instead, I think I learn better using whole words. The flow is more important than the location of each key.
You can get the PC por tof the Dream cast version for free on myabandonware and it even has fairly normal typing tutorials and stuff to compliment the regular zombie killing modes. It's great fun and I highly recommend it.
I love the ZSA's tool for learning to type on their keyboards [0] - you might take inspiration from that. I love that they have both prose and programming modes, since you might want to improve your typing speed of non-alphanumerical characters as well.
I stopped at 1144 and 114. This could really use more of a difficulty ramp. After level 20 or so I really didn't notice it getting any harder and it sort of got boring. There was _one_ level fairly early on where it dumped a ton of letters on me all at once for some reason and I actually started to fall behind, but then it never happened again
This is really good, simple and effective! Though once it gets harder I feel overwhelmed when I can't keep up anymore. Weird because I know where keys are without looking, but when I know I'm doing a speed typing thing, I like panic and look down sometimes or make more mistakes than normal.
Little tip if anyone is serious about learning to touch type: what worked for me was buying a keyboard with blank caps. Struggle for two weeks and boom! You know how to touch type.
The secret fact about touch typing is that it’s awkward af unless you’re sitting behind a proper table and your hands are okay to be locked in a specific position. My hands fly all over the table and land where they feel comfortable. They have some anchors from where they reach keys. But there’s no “homerow” for these free birds. And who am I to cage them into some touch nonsense.
I had the idea to wait for a few letters so I could type them all at once, but by then, it was too hard to figure out which one had come first (I'd assumed it didn't matter and was just trying left-to-right) before they all reached the bottom and I couldn't catch up.
One thing I've discovered is that I subvocalize not just when I read but also when I type, and that this is a not insignificant source of my typos (as when I subvocalize "at the wrong time"). This is especially obvious when I try to transfer a passcode I received on my phone to the computer: I see the passcode, subvocalize it once, turn to my computer, subvocalize another time while my fingers asynchronously type out each letter (often the promises resolve out of order!). But the subvocalization is equally present in ordinary typing, just I have to pay attention to notice it.
Got to 666 (level 7) and wanted to stop, so I did. Of course, the problem is that when, as in this case, there are only two columns remaining, that limits how many letters it can throw at you at once and it actually becomes easier to keep up - you can theoretically go on as long as you want.
Maybe it also needs to be clearer that the key closest to the bottom of the screen must be typed first, that wasn't obvious to me immediately.
I think it's good to try random letter games like this occasionally as well as regular typing tests.
This is awesome! About a year ago, I switched to a Moonlander keyboard. At that time, I figured why not try a different layout while I'm at it, how hard could it be? I compared a bunch of layouts and finally went with Colemak-DHm. I'm nowhere even close to my typing speed on a QWERTY layout, but absolutely loving it! This typing game will really help me get more comfortable with that new layout!
I gave up with the Moonlander after a year. I just couldn’t get to the same regular keyboard speed and when there was a tiny bit of pressure it got way worse. I have it a good stab but had to move away sadly.
Obviously this is more of a personal project to help you out, but could be cool if there were more characters (rest of lowercase, uppercase, special) and the speed kept increasing. Reached level 208 with a score of 2083 before I got bored.
Did anyone else play Mavis Beacon growing up? I recently got a mechanical keyboard and there’s an online version of Mavis Beacon that held up surprisingly well, and got me used to typing on the new layout.
My favourite thing about that were the little games like the driving one, the racing one and the supermarket checkout (numeric keypad). However at the time I suspect I didn't pay proper attention to finger placement.
I can type 100wpm but I want to type faster so I love this kind of thing, but I noticed it stopped responding keyboard input after a minute or so. Thanks anyway!
I had the same impression but the game expects you to type the letters in the order that they appear. I didn't realize I was doing this until there were so many letters on screen which made it seem like the game stopped responding.
Some years later in school I also had a typing class at some point and the teachers thought I cheated because of my high scores so I had to take the test again with multiple teachers hovering over my shoulder – I scored slightly higher then.
I'm usually around 120wpm, which I know is not even a great score amongst typist but it's more than enough for me. I couldn't play the game due to an injury right now unfortunately, but I did click through it and agree with others that I prefer practising words or sentences - plus the letters appearing on different spots on the screen is annoying to me because that's not how I type, so I'm not sure if this is really great for typing practice (for me, at least) – but it could be good at becoming faster at blind typing maybe?