Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lycos 889 days ago
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.

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.

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?

2 comments

>My parents forced me to take typing lessons on typewriters in the 90s

same for me as well. I was originally only going to take a single semester, but wound up taking the second semester as well. The first semester was all "A space S space D space F space" and gaining the muscle memory on how to type. Probably one of the single most useful courses in school for my everyday use. The second semester was much more focused on being an executive assistant with emphasis on how to properly format documents and that kind of thing. Easy-A GPA padding course, but I didn't complain too much since it was one of those classes where I was the only male in the class. They started us off on the older clackity-clack style arms, but if you became fast enough to out type the machine, you could progress to a speedball.

Can you take this please http://wpm-test.com/programming-typing-test/

It's all fun and games until it's code. I barely clear 50 wpm on that, and I know where every key is without looking. I actually dread typing those 3-10 lines on that test, which is how I know I could use more practice, but can't find the time for it.

neat idea, but horrendous font selection. the upper case "I" in deletedIds is indistinguishable from lower case "L". also, didn't like the feel of typos. typically, I know when I make a typo and immediately hit the delete key to fix it. the fact that there's no indication of the typo visually other than the highlight stops progressing is counter-intuitive. I would much rather see the incorrect chars typed as is but then maybe have the highlighting change color. also agree with a sibling comment about unnecessary white spaces, while the writing code in a minimized format is also counter intuitive. hitting enter at line endings is muscle memory just as much as cmd-s/ctrl-s after completing blocks is for me.

edit: after taking the first attempt and then writing this post, I went back to try it again. It said 6 wpm. Tried it again, and it said 5 wpm. That's clearly BS. I thought the first one was an accidental key press that started the timer while I made my comment here. But after restarting it to get an even slower ridiculously wrong time just really makes me mad I wasted my time.

Fine I'll try despite having a painful hand right now, my WPM mention was not coding specific btw but I am always happy to help a throwaway account; I got "You can type 80 words per minute", and slightly more pain now.

The biggest thing that got me here is that it doesn't match my coding style and especially whitespace at line endings were annoying. Also I'm on the couch on my laptop, not behind proper desk.

Still, thanks for trying. If it helps, I have been using this "throwaway" for years!
For me, the excessive spacing makes this pretty painful. If we need a whitespace buffer inside every set of parentheses, I'd expect the IDE to do it for me.
1) My wrists hurt now

2) Thank god for autocompletion and other things IDEs do to save you from typing so much

3) It's weird and unnatural that the test requires so much whitespace.

4) This reaffirms my decision to get myself a keyboard kit like the Elora or Lily58. Main benefits being the otholinear layout and moving the mod keys and others like ([{}]) to the thumbs or other more ergonomic positions.

I got 33, would probably have got a couple more on a programming language/style I'm familiar with instead of whatever that is. (Spaces on the inside of round brackets? Empty bracket pairs with a space between them? No space between if and the opening bracket? Madness.)
I got 62 then tried again and got 63. Seems to be about where I'm at for programming stuff. I will say that the style of code is slightly different than my own coding style which seemed to also hamper me a bit.
That is not a great test. Maybe it's just me but I don't often write code with the proper code style (or even semi-colons depending on the language) and let the IDE handle all of that.
Okay I get why programmers get carpal tunnel now. I've never done so many unnatural moments in such a short period of time. (30 wpm)
46, but I only touch type A-Z then freestyle some of the other characters. Except ( ; , . the close ones)
this is pretty cool. ty for sharing.

>You can type 74 words per minute

>You can type 84 words per minute

(After a few attempts)

I self learned to type using "Iankey"[0] (the manual[1]). In my opinion, it is one of the best training tools I tried - I should search around my old backups to see if I can still find it.

[0] https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/68105/Iankey/ [1] https://www.habisoft.com/pcwwiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=apl...

It seems to have been preserved here with a download link https://www.habisoft.com/pcwwiki/doku.php?id=en:aplicaciones...

Somebody also uploaded it to archive.org: https://archive.org/details/IanKey-Crash-Course-on-Typing-v3...