It's important to note that being a competent typist and being a competent programming typist are different things. On the test that Jeff linked to in his post,

It's important to note that being a competent typist and being a competent programming typist are different things. On the test that Jeff linked to in his post, I scored 101 WPM. Throw in enough symbols and numbers and other non-standard stuff and I am forced to look at the keyboard occasionally which lowers that number significantly. As someone coming back to Vim after years away, this is complicated by the need to memorize and be able to instantly recall a font of often complicated commands. I am so inefficient currently that if a task simply requires some copy/paste operations or I need to work with a very long file I will usually just fire it up in TextMate and use the dreaded mouse to speed things along. I don't believe conventional typing courses are sufficient for gaining the sort of seamless connection talked about here because the focus is on proficiency in typing common characters / words. I much prefer the "Words & Numbers" test on that site (http://typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed_alpha_numeric.php http://typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed_alpha_numeric.php) because it forces the practice of shifting between common characters and less common ones. There's another test I can't recall the link to that basically just makes you type never-ending series of single numbers and symbols along the top row. Learning conventional typing is pretty easy. Becoming a highly skilled programming typist is a task that requires much more practice.