My 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.<p>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.<p>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?
This is neat! Thanks for sharing!<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://keybr.com" rel="nofollow">https://keybr.com</a>
What made me very fast was playing MUDs during high school (25+ years ago, and specifically Arctic MUD, <a href="http://mud.arctic.org/" rel="nofollow">http://mud.arctic.org/</a> ). Have to type fast or your character is going to die.<p>Once you get used to it, an ergonomic keyboard helps a lot to speed up typing as well.
I'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.
It's gotta be fun, and Typing for the Dead is a good one.<p><a href="https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/246580/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/246580/</a><p>More recently though, there's <a href="https://monkeytype.com/" rel="nofollow">https://monkeytype.com/</a> and <a href="https://play.typeracer.com/" rel="nofollow">https://play.typeracer.com/</a> which are fun little breaks during the day.
Cute! Thanks for sharing!<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.zsa.io/live-training/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zsa.io/live-training/</a>
I 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
This 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.
Little 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.
For those who prefer typing entire words, I'll quickly refer to typelit, which has been shared on HN before: <<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24280937">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24280937</a>>.
That's great, but the question of the decade is still what finger to use on the spacebar.<p>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.
One 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.
Got 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.<p>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.<p>I think it's good to try random letter games like this occasionally as well as regular typing tests.
I'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.
This 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!
Has anyone tried this game that uses typing as part of the game play? <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/940680/The_Textorcist_The_Story_of_Ray_Bibbia/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/940680/The_Textorcist_The...</a>
Obviously 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.
Did 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.
Reminds me of a similar game I made <a href="https://qwertytiles.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://qwertytiles.github.io/</a>
I 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!