Learning to Touch type

we are typist first, programmers second - Jeff Atwood

Quick log about how I got to touch typing at 50 wpm from hunt-and-peek in roughly 6 months.

• Focus on accuracy and speed will come.
• Start with keybr.com until all the letters turn green
  • Aim for about 15 - 30mins everyday, also a fun way to fill in your pomodoro breaks
  • You don’t need to touch type during your daily work, that might make you frustrated. Just 30 minutes is enough,
  • You are just trying to internalize the positions of the keys and get used to it
  • One great thing about keybr is that it keeps you on one key until you are able to hit it at a certain speed and accuracy. That’s why I think one of the best for starting out, even if you already know the position of the keys
  • keybr doesn’t show the finger placement on the keyboard, you might have to take a look an image to figure out which finger goes with which key.
  • Unfortunately, keybr doesn’t include letters, symbols or modifier keys. You might have to supplement with another tool (typing.com?). I can no longer remember which tool I used. Any tool should be fine. You just need to know the positions of each key.
• When all your letters are green on keybr, Move to monkeytype.com
  • My setting for this is 1k (1k most common words in English), numbers, punctuations and 60(secs, length of each typing test, planning to increase it 120secs)
  • Aim for >97% accuracy. Worth mentioning again - accuracy over speed
  • At the end of each test, you can retry the words that you missed and keep doing this until you hit a 100% accuracy.

Since I got to a reasonable speed and I could touch type for pretty much my daily work. I stopped the daily practice and plateaued at 50 wpm sometime last year. I hope to get back at this year and get to 70wpm. If you have any other good tips for going from 50 wpm to 70 wpm. leave a comment!