Recently I have been looking into learning how to type better as well. I can type at over 100 wpm without trying, but I do so in a weird way that I learned as a kid and never learned "proper" typing. I cringe at the thought of some of the stretching I force my fingers to do on a daily basis. While I don't yet have any RSI problems, I want to keep it that way so I looked into ergonomic keyboards and got an Ergodox EZ, a split ortholinear keyboard. I also looked into alternative layouts that were more ergonomic and set up Colemak Mod-DH on the keyboard.<p>To help learn how to type from scratch I used keybr.com. It teaches you common short English morphemes like "ing," "ent," etc. It starts you off with very few letters and slowly introduces new ones. I believe this aligns well with Yegge's guitar lick analogy that the author links to in the first paragraph, in contrast to the author's mention of the "speed-type" package which presents you with a real passage from a book.<p>After having used keybr.com I am not sure if the morpheme method has any advantage over the "full passage" method. In theory it makes sense, but I found that after months of practice I was still only presented with morphemes using a handful of letters, so typing any real words was still a big challenge. It also doesn't expose you to any punctuation which was a particular challenge due to the keyboard I used.<p>I would recommend giving keybr.com a try, but I wouldn't be surprised if something that uses real passages would be more effective.<p>As for my progress, I gave up after a couple months. I think I made the mistake of changing too many factors at once. I will try again learning "proper" QWERTY first, then consider switching to a split keyboard, and only <i>then</i> consider switching to Colemak.
Would love to see a demo of this being used, perhaps with a camera feed of the keyboard alongside a screen capture of emacs - kind of like some of the typing demos by contemporary keyboard enthusiasts[0].<p>Personally I've been happy with GNU Typist (AKA gtypist)[1] because it's slim, cross-platform, doesn't depend on a browser, and is simple to extend.<p>[0] <a href="https://youtu.be/pXT89jnAz7k" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/pXT89jnAz7k</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/gtypist/gtypist.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/gtypist/gtypist.h...</a>