Teach Yourself Touch-Typing
Muco Trésor/ June 18, 2020
4 min read
My passion for programming has a root in watching movies, I liked how a hacker would hack a system in minutes with a mind-blowing typing speed. I really wanted to be able to do that, I started doing some research and found that there's a method which could help me to type faster, and that method is touch-typing. I tried to learn it many times in vain, and I reached to the point where I just gave up, but recently I joined a team of exciting developers, most of them were using this method of touch-typing, you would understand how inspiring, and awakening this was. It pushed me to get back on it, and I learned in a month something I tried to learn like, in a 1 year, So in this post, I'm going to show you how you can learn to touch-type and get comfortable at your keyboard.
Here we go, but first, there could be someone who does not understand what is touch typing, maybe Wikipedia can help on that.
Touch typing (also called touch type or touch keyboarding) is a style of typing. Although the phrase refers to typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys—specifically, a touch typist will know their location on the keyboard through muscle memory—the term is often used to refer to a specific form of touch typing that involves placing the eight fingers in a horizontal row along the middle of the keyboard (the home row) and having them reach for specific other keys. (Under this usage, typists who do not look at the keyboard but do not use home row either are referred to as hybrid typists.) Both two-handed touch typing and one-handed touch typing are possible. Touch typing - Wikipedia Okay, thank you Wikipedia, hope we all are on the same page. Now let's see how you can learn it.
First Step:
Head on this website Typing.com, signup as a student, and make sure to complete all the lessons from beginner to advanced. I recommend you to spend at least 10 minutes every day in your early days, the most important thing here, is to not overwork yourself don't take 2 hours or 1 hour straight, just start small, and stay consistent. Because you've already adopted another style of typing you will feel bored while you're learning, because you're used to typing fast and this time it's really slow, don't feel discouraged keep at it, and trust the process. Once you finish your learning session continue with your work and type the way you used to until you finish the beginner section.
Second Step:
At this stage, you should be able to type all characters on the keyboard without looking at it, now it's time to practice typing the characters accurately and correctly, for this practice, there's a good website which is gonna be great for you, it employs statistics and smart algorithms to automatically generate typing lessons matching your skills visit it over here -> keybr.com. I still spend some time on it.
Third Step:
Congratulations !!! 🎉🎉🎉 you did it. At this stage, you should be comfortable with the keyboard, If you want to go far you can also spend some time increasing your speed, the best way to do so, go on this website nitrotype.com where you can participate in an online car racing game by typing.
I hope you enjoyed reading this post, I highly encourage you to stick on learning, touch-typing will definitely help improve your posture and reduce neck pain by keeping one's eyes focused on the display and avoiding a constant need to glance at the keyboard, and it will also improve your productivity especially as a programmer, you spend much time typing.