[shivbhatia]

I somehow managed to get through over a decade as a programmer before deciding to actually learn how to touch type. I was stuck at about 60 wpm with the wrong fingering, decided to invest in learning the right approach and dropped down to 30 wpm for a while, but eventually ended up at 120 wpm after a year or so. I can't overstate how much it's changed my ability to write software. Not having to think the literal characters I'm entering and instead just watching words and symbols appear on the screen at the speed of thought makes the whole experience significantly more enjoyable. Combined with getting good at the Vim keybindings which I did around the same time, it makes programming feel like a video game. Can't recommend highly enough. I used monkeytype.com for the most part.

[absoluteunit1]

> I can't overstate how much it's changed my ability to write software. Not having to think the literal characters I'm entering and instead just watching words and symbols appear on the screen at the speed of thought makes the whole experience significantly more enjoyable.

Literally my experience summarized perfectly in two sentences!

> I used monkeytype.com for the most part.

I used it for a bit too but found typing random words kind of boring - I wanted more pre-existing variety without having to always add custom texts which is why I built https://www.typequicker.com/practice and added the topics mode.

MonkeyType is a really great site though - the community they've built is incredible

> Combined with getting good at the Vim keybindings which I did around the same time, it makes programming feel like a video game.

Omg, exactly this lol. When I was at my last job, some of the most boring tasks were fun because I was gamifiying with vim - without being able to type fast, I would have been miserable doing these types of tickets

[em-bee]

can you describe in more detail how you did the gamifying with vim?

[absoluteunit1]

Ah for work?

I didn't do anything explicitly - it was more like mental game. e.g.: "How can I do this X task with macros?" or "I'm going to try to use a macro across a quicklist of locations", etc

This is what I meant

[em-bee]

ah, so you basically challenge yourself to learn a new vim trick to solve a particular editing problem. ok, that's a goo idea.