Are there typing tutorials specifically for die-hard hunters and peckers?

Question

Do you know typing tutorials / learing software specifically geared at people who have been hunting and pecking (that is, typing with two fingers) for years?

My impression is that most tutorials focus on teaching you where the keys are. This is absolutely useless and mindnumbingly boring for people who have already been typing for years and thus know by heart where each key is. Do you share this impression? I guess the thing to teach is the different way of reaching the keys and some technique tips, like the correct posture and having tactile contact with the keyboard so that you always feel where your hands are. For this you might need a quite different teaching approach than the usual one. (By the way: using a contoured keyboard also helps extremely in my experience, since you feel more easily where your fingers are.)

CLARIFICATION: The main idea of all the typing lessons I have seen seems to be to get you to type gobbledygook for hours and hours - sometimes vaguely disguised as a game. This was too frustrating to me, and, juding from the typing skills of most computer people, I don't seem to be the only one who found this too annoying. :-) So I am looking for something radically different, that I can actually recommend to someone.

What did work for me is that my failed attempts at typing lessons introduced to some key concepts of 10 finger typing to me. I kept concentrating on this from time to time while doing my daily work, and after some years this trned my typing in my own variation of 10 fingers blind without hardly any conscious effort at all. May be there is something that explicitely takes such an lightweight approach?

Answer 1

In my experience, most typing software focuses on teaching you not only where they keys are, but also what fingers to hit them with. Which is what you need if you've been hunting and pecking for a long time.

Don't think you're "too advanced" for something - start with the home row, making sure to type each key with the correct finger, and progress forward slowly.

Or alternatively, switch to a new keyboard layout and learn, say, DVORAK from scratch. The layout switch will force you to throw your muscle memory out the window and ease the transition to touch-typing.

Answer 2

If you want to learn to touch-type, then you need to start from scratch. It's not about learning where the keys are, but which fingers to use to press them.

It just takes time, and it is incredibly frustrating to force yourself to touch type when you know you can get the job done 4 times faster with two-fingered typing.

My experience was that after a lot of practice, I got as fast at touch typing as I was two-fingered (which is pretty quick). However, I then found that I don't actually type newspaper articles all day, I type code. THat means that every 2 seconds I have to move my hands out of touch typing mode to type { and [ and " characters, so two-fingered typing works better.

Also, purely conjecture, but I've never had RSI because I move my entire arm when typing. All the people I know who've had RSI problems have been touch typers, moving only their fingers.