Does anyone here knows how to touch type? What's your speed count?

I picked up touch typing a few months ago (early February), and I type now at 70 wpm approximately with an accuracy of 99% (I still let the occasional mistake slip, unfortunately). Clearly the average is much higher when I'm typing all lower case letters with no numbers or punctuation, and the number is much lower when I'm programming (we have Dennis Ritchie and C to thank for all the curly braces ... Ahhh Python...).

For those of you who don't know, touch typing goes beyond simply the ability of touching without looking at your keyboard. It involves using all 10 fingers all over the keyboard, and relying on optimal hand position to memorize the keyboard layout in muscle memory (as opposed to visualy memory or any other mental trick).

At first, typing speed drops drastically. I had nasty habits of contorting my hands in the nastiest position while typing, and as you know, old habits die hard. However, after 2 months of (quasi) daily practice, I can start feeling a definite improvement in my typing skills.

Most people here would agree that we spend way too much time on a keyboard. Even an increase of 10% (achievable in a few months) in typing speed can amount to several hours a month. It's definitely worth learning in my book.

If you don't know where to start, I strongly recommend TypingWeb. The website offers a very extensive set of exercises, as well as tests, statistics, and tailor-made exercises for your "Problem keys".

Side note for programmers
Combining touch typing skills with an all keyboard text editor like Vim (or my new favorite emacs) will make you fly. Literally, blazing speeds. Touch typing is an endurance game, and think of how much wasted time you lose moving your wrist from keyboard to mouse.

Anyway, I'm mostly interested in getting the discussion going. I would love to get feedback from other members who are currently practicing, as well as others who have done so in the past, and the ones wanting to start.
Have you considered/tried Dvorak too? If you're in it for raw numbers, I think the longer-term no brainer is Dvorak. I tried it a bit a while ago, and it's kind of easy to keep in your head. The keyboard shortcuts get scrambled at times though (I think Vim's arrow keys are letters, so they get jumbled up).

Otherwise, I don't have a problem spending time typing as most of my time is spent thinking about the problems at hand rather than typing them up. Do you have another perspective on this part?
arithma wroteHave you considered/tried Dvorak too? If you're in it for raw numbers, I think the longer-term no brainer is Dvorak. I tried it a bit a while ago, and it's kind of easy to keep in your head. The keyboard shortcuts get scrambled at times though (I think Vim's arrow keys are letters, so they get jumbled up).
I clearly thought about that, but the clear issue with Dvorak is that it's not available everywhere. I'm not in it for "raw number" as much as pragmatic fast typing. If I get to a new job, I don't necessarily want to carry my Dvorak keyboard with me. Not to mention the pain of finding a suitable laptop out there...

Then again I'm typing on a qwerty layout on top of an azerty (thank you France). The actual physical keyboard (well the painting on top of it) shouldn't matter much. Hopefully Dvorak should map easily on top of azerty/qwerty. I don't know, is it worth it to throw away 2 month's worth of work to start again with Dvorak?
Otherwise, I don't have a problem spending time typing as most of my time is spent thinking about the problems at hand rather than typing them up. Do you have another perspective on this part?
Very insightful. However, my take is simple. If I spend 10% of my time typing, that's a bottleneck I want to minimize (or optimize, take your pick). If this function takes 30sec to type vs 3 mins, that's a huge win, considering that it affects far less the flow of thought I was into.

Sadly, I realized over the years that the importance of speed of typing for programmers (touch typing + advanced text editor) is valued only by the people who already got the skill. It's hard preaching to the unconverted crowd ;)
I tried picking it up a few times (well, ok, twice). I always felt my wrists got strained.
A person I worked with at Opera once said that your hands are the bus that links you to the computer, you don't want them to be a bottleneck.
I switched to Dvorak about 4.5 years ago. I wasn't a very good typist before that and found it hard to break some bad habits, so I thought I would go ahead and try Dvorak as a chance to re-learn entirely.

One cool thing about it is that my keyboards are all still in QWERTY, so I have to touch type all the time and there's really no point in looking at the keys, so once you learn it's really a non-issue.

I'm a lot faster than I used to be for sure, and I love how little movement there is compared to QWERTY. I don't think I'm a particularly fast typist — I know a lot of people faster — but I can do 70-80 wpm now, maybe faster in small bursts.

As far as switching for people who are interested. I'd say if you are relatively fast in QWERTY already it's probably not worth it. But if you want to improve and are willing to work hard to get there I think Dvorak is really great. I have never regretted it despite some downsides to being a Dvorak typist in a QWERTY world.

Arithma, you mentioned some problems with keyboard shortcuts... I definitely remember that being one of the harder things to get used to, but I just dove in and didn't try to fight it. I use Vim now and haven't tried to remap any keys, but I also didn't use Vim until after I was typing in Dvorak so switching might be harder if you already use something like that. Either way you just get used to it and it's a trade off one way or the other.

If anyone has any specific questions about learning Dvorak I'm happy to answer them!
despite some downsides to being a Dvorak typist in a QWERTY world
I would love if you would expand on that. I think the only think keeping me from shifting to Dvorak is really not being able to gauge correctly what the downsides are. (The upsides being obvious and widely documented).

For instance one of the things that gets mentioned regularly is how it affects your job, and how you should probably better do it while on vacation.

What are the other pitfalls/downsides/...?
most of you might have heard about google's new TAP keyboard
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/promos/tap/index.html

but seriously,

i've been practicing with typing software for years, and the most difficult thing for me was to re-program my brain to type correctly. i was so into a habit of typing a certain way that i didn't even notice that i was typing incorrectly during the typing exercises in the software.

another perspective that forces you to use touch typing is a blank keyboard,
http://www.daskeyboard.com/model-s-ultimate/

you can also test your skills here// you'll meet people with some crazy 160+wmp skills
http://play.typeracer.com/
rahmu wroteWhat are the other pitfalls/downsides/...?
Everyone else has qwerty.

I'm pretty bad at typing in qwerty now, so using other computers can be a bit annoying. Generally this isn't a huge problem. If I'm doing something at all serious it doesn't take long for me to enable Dvorak and just use that till I'm done, but it's annoying none the less. I have combated this a bit by just changing my typing style. Instead of being in proper typing position I just go to more of a (ridiculous looking) hunt-and-peck style. I guess it depends a lot on how often you use computers that are not your own, and what you do on them. Generally if I'm on another computer I'm troubleshooting/fixing something and it doesn't require a ton of typing anyhow. There is also a website that converts qwerty to Dvorak as you type if you need that in a pinch and can't switch the layout.

Mobile Qwerty.

This one is actually not a downside! For me and a couple others I've talked to who type in Dvorak, typing in qwerty on a cell phone is not actually harder at all! It's really just a different part of the brain that handles thumb-typing on a smaller screen. I have not had any problems with that and in fact I probably can type faster in qwerty on my iPhone than I can on a computer.

One-handed typing.

If you switch your key caps this won't be an issue, but any time I am doing something else (like eating) and need to type a bit with one hand it's definitely harder and requires more thinking to find the right keys. Touch typing is all about having the right hand position, so if you don't have the right hand position it's harder to get oriented. I suppose I could switch to qwerty to do stuff like that, but I don't really ever do that. It's a bit annoying but not that bad.

Sharing a computer with others.

You all probably know about this if you switch between Arabic/English layouts... My wife types in qwerty, so when she or anyone else wants to use my computer I need to switch. This is a minor annoyance but I don't find it bad at all. I have a shortcut that switches, and an indicator in the menu bar that shows what the current layout is.

Making the switch.

I switched to Dvorak when I in university. I generally took notes on my laptop at the time, so I was in situations where I needed to keep up with what was going on in class and couldn't just go at my own pace all the time. There was definitely a time during which I felt like I couldn't type in either layout and that was frustrating.

It can be really frustrating trying to switch. It does take a lot of patience and hard work. I actually found the process to be really fun though. If you are a programmer (besides just being Lebanese) I expect you have the stubbornness and perseverance that it takes if you really want to do it :)

Regarding how it would affect your work, it's hard to say... The good thing is that as a programmer most of your work is not primarily typing lots of text, so I think losing some raw speed for a while isn't that big of a deal for productivity.

Keyboard shortcuts.

One of the harder things to get used to is that keyboard shortcuts are in different places:

The whole grouping of z, x, c, v for undo, cut, copy, paste is completely different. Some things end up worse off, others end up better. For instance on a mac Command-Q quits an application, Command-W closes a window. A common error is to quit when you wanted to close a window which could be really annoying. Those are now in completely different places so it's no longer a problem.

Overall for me like I said I just decided to not fight it and get used to the changes and it's been fine.

Method of learning.

I was very intensive in learning Dvorak for a few days, and practiced a lot for a few weeks straight. I definitely recommend using a typing tutor that is specifically designed for Dvorak. They will start you with a couple letters and some exercises that use just those two and expand from there. It's not fun at first, but it becomes really cool when you have just the home row. In Dvorak about 70% of letters in English (and similar in French) are typed on the home row, so you can actually type a good number of words just there so that's fun.

Also something I did is one or two days I wrote the keys on my fingers before I had the keyboard memorized, and I started visualizing typing when I wasn't on the computer too.

If you do want to learn, I recommend taking your practice slow and not trying to get ahead of yourself. The most important thing is accuracy, not raw speed. If you move fast but have to delete and correct your mistakes you will be slower in the end, and it forms bad habits.


Anyway, good luck and I hope this helps you make a decision!

dp0001 wrotei've been practicing with typing software for years, and the most difficult thing for me was to re-program my brain to type correctly. i was so into a habit of typing a certain way that i didn't even notice that i was typing incorrectly during the typing exercises in the software.
This is one of the big reasons I switched to Dvorak. If you already are used to one way of typing it's really hard to break those habits because it's easy to fall back into them without noticing. However, by switching you have a chance to re-train yourself from scratch, and if you're disciplined about it you can have better habits this time around!
So I tried out TypeRacer and I am here:
56 wpm
91.2% accuracy.

I don't know what that's considered to be. Too slow? Fairly average? Improvable?
I use a QWERTY on an MS Comfort Curve 2000 (perfectly ergonomic and very economic keyboard)
56wpm is fairly above average, (65 is the beginning of standing out), but I agree with Zef when he says that you should focus on accuracy over speed (91% is low, very low. I set myself the goal of never leaving an exercise until I can pass it with at least 97%). Many things could be said:

- It's really tough going up to insane speed with a low accuracy average.
- Accuracy will teach you to (muscle-)remember the keyboard layout. That is your real goal. Speed will come naturally after that.
- Something to keep in mind, touch typing was invented on typewriters, at a time where the backspace key could not have existed. Try (not very easy really) to ban it altogether from your typing arsenal (100% accuracy is not really that far off, I can almost do so, even when typing right now on Lebgeeks. I have actually touched the backspace key twice since the beginning of typing this post). This is a typical case of the Less is More.

@zef: wonderful post! You paint quite the picture. Thank you very much for sharing. You actually convinced my of shifting. The "affecting your work" part still scares me, so I won't do so right away. But I'm (3rd backspace hit) intimately convinced it's the better thing to do.

(Unrelated, I scored a 75wpm this morning with 99% accuracy. 2 mistakes on 20 lines of text, with punctuation and cap letters).
@rahmu, glad I could help! I'm excited to hear how it goes for you in the future!
6 days later
@MSD: I actually got laughed at because I fell for it. Shame on me :)
Hi Rahmu,

Have you tried this typing software

RapidTyping is a free software that allows you to improve your typing skills. I have the portable version if you want I can attach by email
_______________________________________________________________________________________
PROGRAM OPERATION INSTRUCTIONS
1.To run, click Start, then Programs, click the RapidTyping, then click the RapidTyping program item.
2.To uninstall, click Start, then Programs, click the RapidTyping, then click the Uninstall item.

REQUIREMENTS
RapidTyping requires Windows 7, Vista, Windows 2000/2003, Windows XP;
Hardware Requirements:
- Pentium or faster recommended;
- Minimum display area 800x600;
- Display with more than 256-colors recommended (High Color);
- 32 MB of RAM;
- 12 MB free hard drive space recommended;
- 101-Key Enhanced keyboard or AT-Style Keyboard or equivalent;

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
RapidTyping license can be found in the "license.txt" file.

Copyright (C) 2007-2010 RapidTyping Software
All Rights Reserved
Hey thanks for the share, however:

1- I don't have a Windows machine.
2- I understand it's free, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're allowed to redistribute it. Check the license (I cannot do it at work) it will tell you what you need.

In any case, thank you for mentionning it. Do you have any experience with the app?
No I have no exp. with the app just used it to enhance my typig speed, I used a portable version. You should have a 2nd PC running windows as I have a 2nd laptop running Ubuntu server 11

Regards,
a year later
typing.io is a nice tool for touch typing practice for programmers. For practicing beyond the source code available on the site you need to pay.