4 ms·
(I'm a self-taught touch-typist typing at 100 WPM+... Not anywhere near a world record but not too slow either) Not bad but I do prefer typeracer. Now this on
by martinced 14y ago
(I'm a self-taught touch-typist typing at 100 WPM+... Not anywhere near a world record but not too slow either)
Not bad but I do prefer typeracer. Now this one seems to be better done than typeracer: I like the fact that you can see the keys (that said it should take into account ANSI / ISO physical layouts and at least QWERTY / AZERTY and maybe DVORAK logical layouts).
Note that touch-typing is probably going to be faster than non touch-typing, so I'm advocating learning to touch-type (even if you're an old fart who never did and thinks he cannot switch anymore -- not true, I've done it after more than ten years and I don't regret it).
For a start lessons where you endlessly input "asdf" aren't that great. It's still an open discussion if this type of training as any value (included for musicians / pianists, even the ones who think it has value because they've brainwashed by doing it endlessly repeatedly -- Jimi Hendrix didn't ; )
Basically: what is the point in writing "asdf fdas sdaf fads" etc.? Are you going to write that in the Real-World [TM]? No. So why even spend time training doing it instead of doing the real thing?
It's like when Agassi changed and got a new trainer and told him that his old trainer would have him run for miles and miles and miles and his new trainer told him something like: "That's over. What you do during a match is start to run very fast then stop immediately, then run in the other direction. That's what you're going to be training to do now.".
These are two different conceptions of training. To me the first one doesn't make much sense but YMMV.
Then the other issue is that, as has been pointed out, nobody is coding like that anymore: editors do close matching parenthesis, brackets, etc. and you enter "fi" and then hit <TAB> and the skeleton of a "for (int i = 0; i < ...; i++) {" appears, you start to type the first three letters of any method, function, variable and use some expand functionality to get the auto-completion, etc.
The way I did taught myself to touch-type is simple: read about the very basics of touch-typing (or ask any secretary to teach you: it basically takes two minutes -- that's what I did), buy an "otaku" keyboard or set of keycaps (a keyboard on which the keys are "blank"), put your index fingers respectively on 'f' and 'j' and start... working!
To me doing what you're actually going to do, just like Agassi's trainer would advice, is the best way to learn.
Not some "technique" or "method" that people still don't know if it makes any sense or not.
Think outside the box.