A tool that increased my typing speed

The author proposes that we&#x27;re somehow blocked from success because we can&#x27;t type fast enough. Is that true? I don&#x27;t agree; in fact, I&#x27;d rather be concise and communicate well than vomit more words onto the screen.<p>Additionally, beyond Dvorak, is there a better way to increase typing speed than spending what must be hours and hours building a bespoke solution for each one of your machines? And what is the cost of the inevitable tsunami of errors you make in the learning process? Are these neural pathways more valuable than say, learning a new language or practicing a different skill?

The legend of QWERTY being designed specifically to slow typists down will never die. It has that perfect &quot;folk&quot; quality, it <i>should</i> be true, the problem is simply that there isn&#x27;t any evidence for it.<p>What does stick out about QWERTY, is that you can type the word &quot;typewriter&quot; using only the top keys, a trick that made it easier for typewriter salesmen to memorize and demonstrate that little trick when selling their wares. And we do have evidence that this motivated the layout.

Why bring the whole Devorak part into the article? Also, I&#x27;m surprised the author didn&#x27;t go pure stenograph then because that&#x27;s <i>way</i> faster.<p>WPM is only a good measure of WPM.<p>The best coders don&#x27;t need to type faster. The best writers still hand write things or type on DOS[0]. Once you hit a baseline competency, other areas of improvement&#x2F;reward far outweigh the time devoted than to a better WPM.<p>Wanting to type faster is fine, but do not mix it with being more effective aside from being a great typist.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg&amp;feature=emb_title" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg&amp;feature=emb_titl...</a>

The problem for me is rarely typing speed, unless if I&#x27;m transcribing something.<p>No, the bandwidth chokepoint is organizing thoughts, and those thoughts into sentences (or into code snippets).<p>It is always nice to be able to express things as quickly as possible, but I&#x27;m not sure how much this might actually speed someone up (practically) past a certain threshold (say, 70wpm). The biggest thing that comes to mind might only be accuracy, which can boost output.

If you&#x27;re on Linux and want to do this look for ibus-typing-booster. I submitted it 6 days ago, but it didn&#x27;t get much attention. Unlike the author&#x27;s method of manually setting up shortcuts for the most used words, ibus-typing-booster learns your most frequent words and then it&#x27;s just a matter of typing a few chars followed by space, which inserts the whole word.

Having used it for 20 years now... I don&#x27;t find that dvorak improves my typing speed. If anything it probably net reduces my productivity since often I&#x27;m hitting paste (ctrl-v) and I miss and hit exit window (ctrl-x).<p>However, I like it because it feels comfortable typing in it, way more so than qwerty.

In grade 9 a friend and me thought wouldn&#x27;t it be a great idea to do the office administration class as a means to meet girls, so we did. Class was about 90% female and we learned to type not looking at the keyboard. Now, as a programmer that has been the class that benefitted me the most over the last 20 years.

The author&#x27;s ultimate solution of &quot;use OSX&#x2F;iOS shortcuts for every word to speed up your typing&quot; is pretty wild.<p>I could imagine myself using this method when I think about the _tens of minutes_ of my life I&#x27;ve probably saved now by just making &quot;@@&quot; a shortcut for my email address.<p>Unfortunately, like Dvorak, which the author also proposes, it has the &quot;doesn&#x27;t work on my friend&#x27;s computer&quot; problem. Although, maybe a little easier to untrain your fingers from than Dvorak...

Record yourself writing, or programming, or whatever it is you do at the keyboard. You will see that it is not the speed of your typing that is the bottleneck, it is the creative process.<p>You are not a mindless machine hacking away at the keyboard. And, if you are, then the life hack take away is to <i>stop and think</i> a bit before typing.<p>Going slower often has lots of benefits.

OP here: happy to answer any questions about my setup. Just to clarify - the core idea is not shortcuts but how you can use them to integrate changes in your life like reflecting on how you feel or how well you understand your learning material.<p>More thoughts: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24702678" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24702678</a>.

&quot;You can 3x your typing speed if you set up shortcuts for most frequently used words to decrease the number of symbols you have to type. Here’s how it works on Mac OS or iOS.&quot;<p>So a bit a predictive typing assistance and customizations.<p>&quot;Here are some ideas for reflection shortcuts that I use:<p><pre><code> “wam”—“Why am I feeling this way?” “wwl”—“What went well?” “wcb”—What could have gone better?&quot; </code></pre> Like duckduckgo bangs I doubt I would be able to remember more than 10.

I find it a bit ironic that an article about how to type 3 times faster is roughly 4 times longer than it needs to be to make its point.

I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout 20 years ago (in the middle of a mission-critical project, no less), and not only doubled my typing speed, but significantly reduced arm&#x2F;finger strain. Once you put in the 3-ish weeks to retrain your brain, and get back to at least your original typing speed, you&#x27;ll never go back to QWERTY.

QWERTY having been designed to slow down typists is a myth:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-lies-youve-been-told-about-the-origin-of-the-qwerty-keyboard&#x2F;275537&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-l...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smithsonianmag.com&#x2F;arts-culture&#x2F;fact-of-fiction-the-legend-of-the-qwerty-keyboard-49863249&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smithsonianmag.com&#x2F;arts-culture&#x2F;fact-of-fiction-...</a>

My phone has predicted text on the top of the keyboard. I wonder if the secret is not a bunch of custom shortcuts, but a better mind-meld with the predicted text so that you the user hit the predicted value every time. You get the same speed and correctness benefits mentioned in the article.<p>But I’ve never seen a touch typing program which let’s you use the predicted text.

&gt; That’s right. The very first “Type-Writer,” designed by Christopher Sholes 146 years ago, used the exact same QWERTY keyboard that‘s in front of you.<p>Weird, I can’t seem to find the M key to the right of my L. (Not that the resemblance isn’t clear, but that’s not the only difference and they did say “<i>exact</i> same”).

One of the funnier things I can say about my life - growing up playing RuneScape (like, beginning of classic, starting at the age of 5) and arguably MapleStory led to having 120wpm+ QWERTY speeds with ease. I think during the few times I ever cared to really test myself I hit over 160. Also won my spelling bee every year eligible (4 years) and placed pretty well at states my final year. Never touched a study book or really even cared to compete - parents bribed me to enter. All from MMORPG&#x27;s... Probably not something to be proud about haha.<p>I really think a portion of kids that grew up playing RuneScape got a bit of head up over peers. I know it&#x27;s led to me never having been scammed more than once and starting a successful business at a very young age. Shame what happened to the game, but I guess all good things must die.

While the first part of the article is on alternative keyboard layouts like Dvorak, the second half of the article is actually a discussion of personalized shorthand &quot;brief forms&quot; (somewhat confusingly called &quot;shortcuts&quot; in the article). It would be really cool to have a seamless autocomplete system on Linux. As far as I know there isn&#x27;t one. It would be handy in my opinion when typing domain specific jargon, perhaps using something like vim&#x27;s leader key but OS-wide: for example, &quot;`sf&quot; would expand to &quot;star formation&quot;.

What about confusions regarding shortcuts that depend on the context? HW for hardware in CS or homework? We do use unexpanded shortcuts and out brain knows how to interpret them from the context. Adding shortucts like these in an editor to expand into words would create a lot of unnecessary problems and solutions IMO. Everybody knows for example that im not talking about the internatinal math olympiad here or internatioal money order. Acronyms in this case are a good example how the context create ambiguities if we dont know the context

Is there any app to create the shortcuts automatically? Like you type all day, at the end of the day, the app see you wrote 5 times &#x27;thank you&#x27; and it suggest you to use ty as shortcut,,,

Well, yesterday I edited a Makefile under TMUX by using ed, so typing speed isn&#x27;t an issue there, ed commands save much more time than typing fast. Ditto in the computer. As my environment is tmux+framebuffer based, I don&#x27;t care on breaking typing speed records in gtypist, I type in normal speeds, as everything else is scripted I don&#x27;t care of not being fast enough.

I thought this was familiar. Turns out it was posted here before but the article was on a different site.<p>Here&#x27;s the previous discussion (40 comments): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24702678" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24702678</a>

On a somewhat relevant note - there was an interesting post I saw sometime back on designing an optimal keyboard layout <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21425426" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21425426</a>

tl;dr author proposes to use shorthands for common words...<p>The &quot;feature&quot; that is built-in into most IDEs and most programmers are using on daily basis, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;idea&#x2F;using-live-templates.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jetbrains.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;idea&#x2F;using-live-templates.htm...</a><p>I really don&#x27;t want to be that guy, but the typing with 3x speed certainly didn&#x27;t helped the article to be concise and to the point.

My average typing speed is ~140-150WPM and I can go over 200 in short bursts. I&#x27;ve only used QWERTY. Thus I don&#x27;t think Dvorak or any of the other layouts has that much of an advantage.<p>However, I think the design of the keyboard&#x27;s switches makes a huge difference; I can only reach those speeds on the keyboard I normally use, which is a pretty generic one with rubber domes, but where ~2mm of travel is enough to register a keypress, and the keyfeel is very light and bouncy. Before that I used a mechanical keyboard with (very) clicky Blue ALPS (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deskthority.net&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Alps_SKCM_Blue" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;deskthority.net&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Alps_SKCM_Blue</a> ) switches, and struggled to reach 120WPM. Other keyboards I&#x27;ve tried timing typing speed on include a Thinkpad X60 (can barely exceed 100, but quickly tiring), Apple low-profile (80-90, very tiring), and the famous IBM Model M (75-80, impressively loud and extremely tiring.)

It makes me happy how many other people here are also slow typists and don’t care. If you’re a programmer and consider a high WPM essential to your craft... you might be doing something wrong lol

Yes this will save you all the time you will later spend on making your shortcut work when it breaks or every time you get a new device.<p><i>Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.</i>

At my last job at some courtroom they used wordperfect 12. Clerks used the quick-word feature to define their own shortcuts.

I still dont understand how is this different from autocompletion ? What did the author mean by &quot;shortcuts&quot; ?

A tool plus your determination. When there is a will there is a way. The tools is just an anecdote.

The best tool I ever got for typing was a keyboard with no letters on the key caps.

So, basically he describes the software &quot;PhraseExpress&quot; for Mac and PC.

The only shortcut I needed to be successful:<p>&quot;sout&quot; extends to System.out.println<p>;)

i addded js dvorak as input option on my forum software to make it easier for anyone not on their computer

I was with the author about typing and setting up shortcuts.<p>Then they went on a wild crazy tangent into pop psychology, and, uh...no thank you.

WPM is not the bottleneck.