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Show HN: I made a game to improve my typing speed
- olekenneth 3y agoGithub: https://github.com/olekenneth/keysmash https://github.com/olekenneth/keysmash
- surajcm 3y agoThanks a lot for sharing this, I would love to see an audio mute button :)
- BossingAround 3y agoCute! Thanks for sharing! 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. [0] https://www.zsa.io/live-training/ https://www.zsa.io/live-training/
- crimsoneer 3y agoHonestly, ZSA are bloody wonderful. I bought a Moonlander this year and the whole vibe is so cosy
- xwowsersx 3y agoGot one a few months ago. With Oryx to configure it, it's an absolute game changer.
- throw1234651234 3y agoThat's great, but the question of the decade is still what finger to use on the spacebar. P.S. Looks like it's also a working memory trainer, since you have to remember which letter chain appeared on the screen first. Still kind of cool.
- dwringer 3y agoI 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.
- cocoflunchy 3y agoLittle 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.
- BtM909 3y agoI fillowde yoir tip amd yiu are rigjt. I can ty[e blinmd;y and don't jave to wprry that I ise ghe wrpmg keus.
- wruza 3y agoThe 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.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoThis 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.
- v7engine 3y agoHad to give up at Points 1056 / Level 105 as it is never ending.
- dingo999 3y agoHas anyone tried this game that uses typing as part of the game play? https://store.steampowered.com/app/940680/The_Textorcist_The_Story_of_Ray_Bibbia/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/940680/The_Textorcist_The...
- evanjrowley 3y ago1. That looks super fun 2. Reminds me a bit of Typing of The Dead: Overkill[0]. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/246580/The_Typing_of_The_Dead_Overkill/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/246580/The_Typing_of_The_...
- morley 3y agoI've played Textorcist! It's a solid game, and it's fun insofar as it's challenging and makes you want to play it more. (It's been a couple years since I've played it, hence the vagueness.) IIRC there's a bit of a difficulty spike when you have to transition from typing English to typing Latin...
- geraldwhen 3y agoTyping of the dead is the definitive title to learn to type. If you beat the game, you will be able to type 150wpm.
- hodanli 3y agoI'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.
- Retr0id 3y agoztype is a similar typing game, but based on whole words: https://zty.pe/ https://zty.pe/
- nerdponx 3y agoI didn't expect this to be so fun. The sound effects are especially satisfying.
- thatxliner 3y agoFor me, this is especially true for learning Colemak
- mtlynch 3y agoThis is neat! Thanks for sharing! 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. [0] https://keybr.com https://keybr.com
- craniumslows 3y agoWhat 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!
- LeafItAlone 3y agoThe 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.
- clbrmbr 3y agoFor 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.
- aroo 3y agoObviously 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.
- chriskanan 3y agoWhat made me very fast was playing MUDs during high school (25+ years ago, and specifically Arctic MUD, http://mud.arctic.org/ 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.
- dwags 3y agosame for me but with Medievia... in elementary school (thanks older bro)
- dandigangi 3y agoHeh, reminds me of Zork. Teaching at a bootcamp and they had to build that as a project. Text adventure game.
- karaterobot 3y agoHa, 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.
- soggybutter 3y agoI 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
- lamontcg 3y agoreminds me of an old apple II game that i can no longer remember the name of
- bitzun 3y agoI 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!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shimonabi 3y agoMy ears are ringing.
- yterdy 3y agoI'd be remiss if I didn't mention steno and Plover in a thread about typing speed. That's the holy grail once I manage to escape QWERTY prison.
- mypgovroom 3y agoLOL cool
- dandigangi 3y agoThis is nifty. Played for a bit. Can type 90-120 so was pretty easy for me. Haha nice work!
- lycos 3y agoMy 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?
- throw1234651234 3y agoCan you take this please http://wpm-test.com/programming-typing-test/ http://wpm-test.com/programming-typing-test/ 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.
- inssein 3y agoThat 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.
- ralusek 3y agoI 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.
- lycos 3y agoFine 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.
- mal10c 3y agoThis 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!
- simonbarker87 3y agoI 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.
- fragmede 3y agoIt's gotta be fun, and Typing for the Dead is a good one. https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/246580/ https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/246580/ More recently though, there's https://monkeytype.com/ https://monkeytype.com/ and https://play.typeracer.com/ https://play.typeracer.com/ which are fun little breaks during the day.
- Unbefleckt 3y agoYou 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.
- one_more_q 3y agoMan I love this game so much. Wished there was a typing version of other classics like half life.
- uhepran 3y agoNice except the sound.
- aragonite 3y agoOne 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.
- layer8 3y agoJust mashing the keyboard sort of works.
- katella 3y agoMy fav is typing.io, they pull code from GitHub repos for you to practice with.
- bobsmooth 3y agoI like the idea but for the love of god use a btter sound effect. Here's some www.freesound.org
- KANahas 3y agoDid 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.
- wt__ 3y agoMy 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.
- apollonue 3y agoReminds me of a similar game I made https://qwertytiles.github.io/ https://qwertytiles.github.io/
- z3ncyberpunk 3y agoNeat but many letters get stuck and won't register as being pressed when multiple appear at once.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hombre_fatal 3y agoI 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.
- tmtvl 3y agoFor those who prefer typing entire words, I'll quickly refer to typelit, which has been shared on HN before: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24280937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24280937>.
- bobobob420 3y agoTyperacer.com Monkeytype.com 10fastfingers.com
- wt__ 3y agoGot 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.