Learn touch typing – it's worth it

Fellow Dvorakist here. I totally agree that touch typing is the way to go when learning it. Labels just hold you back and you get so much more from learning to touch type.

I also agree with your point about touch typing QWERTY. I'd even bet that learning to touch type any non-QWERTY keyboard layout, even if it's less efficient than QWERTY, is beneficial purely because it erases bad habits ingrained over time from undisciplined typing. Blank keycaps are the a true meta.

> I don’t think I could have taught myself touch typing on QWERTY because I was already too ingrained with bad habits

It is possible to learn touch typing on a layout where you have already developed bad practices. That's what I did on Qwerty. There will initially be a tendency to switch back to the hunt-and-peck method, since you're not yet fully comfortable with touch typing. This can be curtailed by forcing yourself from looking at the keyboard. It's nearly impossible to hunt-and-peck without looking at the keyboard occasionally. However, that tendency will eventually disappear as you become comfortable with touch typing, as it's the easier style among the two.

Similar to me! In my case it was a YouTubers/Twitch streamers like Prime and others that typed so fast...I wanted that for myself.

Thanks for sharing - seems like a very detailed guide and something down my alley :)

Agree. I wish the school system wouldn't ignore it as it does in many places.

Even with touch devices, to gain productivity, i see people to switch to keyboard input because pen or touch aren't fast enough and voice typing isn't possible for example in auditoriums.

But, don't learn to type quicker, learn to type precisely. Speed will come.

> Few people feel the need to learn it.

Is this true? Almost every educated adult under age ~45 that I encounter touch types. Certainly in the white-collar/tech professional sphere.

There is definitely a generational divide where it becomes far less common with those who did not grow up with ubiquitous computer usage.

It's a skill that should be taught in school. Computers (and the Internet) are so important in our lives, why would we not want to lower the barrier between using them?

Chatting nowadays happens with thumbs.

Even in previous generations, most self-taught people get fast at hunt&peck rather than learning proper touch-typing. It is not a natural skill in any way, you need a conscious effort to stop looking and to limit your main fingers wandering.

I generally tried to keep my kids away from excessive screen usage, but I motivated them to touch-type anyway, because I always wished I'd learned it earlier than I did (in my early 30s). I see them reaping benefits already in their teenage years, knocking out school assignments very quickly and being able to focus on the content more than the typing.

I'm also confused by this. I taught myself touch typing in the 90's. I also had a required semester-long class that covered only typing my freshman year of high school (1999). Neither of my parents learned it, but I figured everyone younger than me knew how. Pretty shocking to find out that's not the case.

I can't imagine not being able to touch-type. It's such second-nature that I can hold a conversation with someone while typing out separate thoughts I'm having about the conversation on a keyboard.

The average American types around 40wpm, so definitely not touch typing. People definitely get by without learning it.

I work in a huge variety of fields and interact with people from all places in US society. My guess would be maybe 25-35% of people I've worked with use touch typing. Everyone chicken pecks.

Most people use phones nowadays and rarely use a physical keyboard. It just isn't that important to most people. They can get by without it.

It's pretty difficult to pick it up naturally when you only use a touchscreen and never a keyboard, since there aren't any physical keys to stabilize your hand position. It's becoming more common for people to only use their phones or tablet and not a desktop or laptop.

Honestly I'm consistently surprised - I've worked at Amazon and seen many engineers, product people, etc type with incorrect techniques.

I've seen interns looking for symbols on their keyboard for a second or two (the tilde "~" or the pipe symbols "|") when I asked them to type in a certain shell command.

Since I started building this website, many of my friends and family learned touch typing because of the site never even heard of proper touch typing technique until I started talking about what I was working on.

I think it's due to poor education - there's no institutionalized course that teaches this. A couple schools maybe, but nothing on a big scale.

Kind of mind boggling given that almost every desk job uses a keyboard

Yeah this is mind boggling to me as a millennial. I didn't set out to learn touch typing either. Hell, my sister who isn't a techie learned to do it just be spending all afternoon on LiveJournal and AIM chat. I don't understand how one could be an avant reader of hn and be interested in an article about this like... you don't? You can't? Whaaaa?

> I can't overstate how much it's changed my ability to write software. Not having to think the literal characters I'm entering and instead just watching words and symbols appear on the screen at the speed of thought makes the whole experience significantly more enjoyable.

Literally my experience summarized perfectly in two sentences!

> I used monkeytype.com for the most part.

I used it for a bit too but found typing random words kind of boring - I wanted more pre-existing variety without having to always add custom texts which is why I built https://www.typequicker.com/practice and added the topics mode.

MonkeyType is a really great site though - the community they've built is incredible

> Combined with getting good at the Vim keybindings which I did around the same time, it makes programming feel like a video game.

Omg, exactly this lol. When I was at my last job, some of the most boring tasks were fun because I was gamifiying with vim - without being able to type fast, I would have been miserable doing these types of tickets

I learned to read before kindergarten by having my parents read to me (but not, they say, attempting to teach me). Therefore reading doesn't need to be taught because people exposed to books enough will learn it automatically?

> So, I posit: touch typing doesn't need to be taught because the people who use a keyboard enough to benefit from it will learn something better automatically.

This is a pretty poor argument that can be applied to practically any skill. "Why should we teach people in a structured way? They can just learn it by doing it!"

For many people, having a structure to learn from is extremely helpful, even if they do diverge from it to learn in their own way.

Also I don't think we should focus solely on "people who will benefit from it" - presumably you're talking about people whose livelihoods depend directly on typing efficiently. What about those who only use it casually but still want to communicate effectively?

For me, using a keyboard with more keys around the thumbs and configurable keymaps with layers solves this. I have space, return and esc all easily accessible on my thumbs and my most used punctuation across the easily reached keys (such as home row) on a layer, also activated with my thumb.

fwiw I use a moonlander but many keyboards could work equally well I'm sure

Like many above, I learned on a split keyboard. If you are committed to touch typing and the 2 points you mentioned bother you, I highly suggest a split keyboard. The placement for backspace and return being on your thumbs is so common-sense that it feels stupid to have it any other way.

> a natural fast typer will naturally lean away from home row "touch typing" to a top-middle row hover style of typing

Yeah, I agree. I've noticed that some folks who reach 160wpm+ start to move off from the standard, "best practice" touch typing technique. With the hand guide visualization on https://www.typequicker.com I focused on just following the common "best practice" approach.

I should add a comment somewhere on the site that these are just the general recommended finger placements and not gospel.

Certain keys are just more comfortable with variation. I use an orth keyboard split keybaord as well so for me especially the Z key makes sense to type with pinky. On a standard qwerty keyboard, I've seen folks do both pinky and ring finger.

I don't think either the correct way - whatever variation of standard touch typing feels better and helps you type faster is the solution

I struggled for years with touch-typing on QWERTY. I remember the "hovering" action that you described.

After switching to Dvorak, within months, I naturally began touch-typing. I suspect it is due to it being home-row-heavy, with all vowels on the left and most common consonants on the right.

Oh I moved to a split keyboard as well!!

This was my next big step in my typing journey.

Started with a crkbd/corne and now ended up with QMK modded Kinesis Advantage 2. I don't type as fast on the Kinesis due to deep keywells and just an insane amount of modded keys, but my hands thank me every day.

One other reason that led me down the path of correct typing and ergo keyboards was hand pain

How do you do on a normal keyboard?

Switching to a split keyboard also is what got me touch typing, but only on the split keyboard. The moment I revert back to a regular keyboard, I go back to my old typing habit, and even practicing to touch type on a regular keyboard quickly feels uncomfortable.

> I'm surprised that we are mentioning a paid site here and we are not mentioning tools like monkeytype and typeracer where you can do good practice for absolute free. In this particular space monkeytype is a super customizable tool that can fit tons of different people.

OP and site creator here.

Yeah I agree, monkeytype and typeracer are awesome! Huge fan and user of both.

I've just released this TypeQuicker app and I'm figuring out the best ways to monetize. I'm really hoping never run ads (I'm huge into anti-ad websites. I pay for things like Kagi for example, even though Google Search is free to use) which is why I'm settling for the freemium model (with some paid features).

For the record, everything the other sites you mentioned, I offer for free by the way :)

The paid features on https://www.typequicker.com/pricing are for AI powered, personalized learning. SmartPractice which analyses typing history and creates personalized, natural text focusing on user weakpoints, target practice to generate natural text based on certain sequences, etc.

Check out the video demo at the pricing page I added - I don't think any site offers this for free and that's all I'm charging for (I need to pay for the LLM API).

Let me know your thoughts! I'm really passionate about typing, keyboards, etc. I want to build the best typing platform and I want it to be valuable.

I signed up the site mentioned, most features are free and I like it. The biggest plus I see here compared to monkey or typeracer is that this site shows the hands and fingers visually. That makes it easier to follow and learn

I learned with Typing of the Dead, its abandonware now and easy to find. Has lots of game modes and tutorials and is quite funny.

Hey - OP here.

I built https://www.typequicker.com/practice

I can suggest trying the custom mode and just practising the symbols alone - we have the keyboard and hand visualization to help with that so you don't have to look down on the keyboard.

When I just built the site (built it out of interest for myself to learn programming and have flexibility with whatever features I wanted), this is kind of what I did.

Whatever was a pain for me to type, I'd just paste it into the custom and practice that until I got comfortable

> and I also can type fine without looking at the keyboard.

You are touch typing. You're just not home-row touch-typing.

I don't do it that way either, developed my own style playing multiplayer StarCraft in the late 90s/early 2000s. Home row has always felt awkward, I have small hands and have to twist my wrists to reach keys when trying it. Instead my hands mostly hover with fingertips constantly in contact, and I'm using my elbows and shoulders for coarse movements across the keyboard. I have occasionally gotten comments about how weird it looks, from people who only know home-row touch-typing.

It's just that home-row is usually the only thing taught so most people think it's the only style of touch typing.

Agreed, Touch Typing is probably worse than what you develop naturally once you get to the 100+ WPM mark. I guess Touch Typing is just the simplest, easiest method to codify and teach.