How do I improve my typing skills?

Question

How do I improve my typing skills?
I still can't get the fingers correct, and the speed

Answer 1

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001188.html

Answer 2

Practice makes perfect. Actually lots of practice makes perfect..

Answer 3

A touchtyping tutor can be very beneficial, depending on your patience (although, I assume that you are committed to doing so, as you are posting here! :D) and the tutor itself. I have used the open-source TypeFaster typing tutor - the paid ones are a rip-off.

Answer 4

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.

Answer 5

Type racer is a fun way to practice your typing against other typists.

Written at 33wpm, 2 mistakes I need practice

Answer 6

Once you have tried you hand at the touch-typing software what you can do is force yourself to type with the proper technique while you are actually doing something where typing itself is really the chore(e.g. coding), this way you have to get the bottleck(typing slowly) out of the process to get to the satisfying part(seeing your program run). I did it, while I played with the touch-typing tool for about a week but after that I never needed it because I do so much typing everyday anyway so I got my practice of touch-typing while working on something else.

Answer 7

Surprisily, after nearly 10+ years of hardcore computer use and programming, I can still only type with 2 fingers (and right thumb) on each hand.

I have had no active training to type and I cannot touch type for the life of me. Yet, my typing speed is VERY quick and that comes entirely from practise and using the keyboard upto 10 hours a day. I just seem to know where the keys are when I type, although if you asked me to draw a keyboard, I would be stuck beyond QWERTY!

To me, the best way to type more accurately and faster is to learn to write. I write a blog and lots of documentation/proposals, and over time you get fast and accurate. At least by my experience!

Answer 8

I don't agree that practices makes perfect in typing without basic typing practice. I do heavy coding and typing for 10+ years and still can't type 10 fingers with full speed (currently ~55wpm), however I know people with 2 years computer usage with proper typing training and they can write faster than me.

Basically before starting practising with a game such as Typing of the dead, use a type teaching application.

Answer 9

It's hard to unlearn the 2-finger typing habit for the keyboard layout (usually QWERTY) you are familiar with.

What I did was switch to the Dvorak layout and learn touch typing with that. I didn't use a typing tutor, just forced myself to use that layout for a few weeks. There was no temptation to look at the keyboard, as the printed characters did not match what was typed.

Having lost the habit of looking at the keyboard (and forgotten the key locations), I was able to re-learn the QWERTY layout but this time I was touch-typing properly.

The increase in speed was quite small though. And my productivity dropped for the first few days.

Answer 10

I scored a slightly average speed following Jeff's link to some addictive typing test. (63wpm) And i learn all these touch typing from doing a lot of IM chatting with friends. But my capital case usage are pretty atrocious :P

When you have multiple friends with a lot to say it forces you to learn where all the keys are and before you know it you can pretty much type it via intuition rather than looking at the keyboard.

Also I type a lot of documents in words and even blog, so all those typing definitely does help you, because you don't really feel that it's practice rather it's just you trying to type what's in your head into the screen.

Answer 11

Why do you believe this would be an important thing to do? If you are typing fast enough, does it really matter whether you do it "correctly" or not? Also note that, as a programmer, "fast enough" does not mean "as fast as possible" - if you're programming at 150wpm, then there's a good chance that your code is crap because you don't have time to think about it sufficiently. (When I'm writing code, I frequently average something closer to 0.1wpm because I'm stopping to consider how I should best approach the next section or whether the previous section could be done better.)

As general background, I started programming when I was 8 and came out of high school typing faster than most touch-typists that I knew at the time without ever having spent more than 5-10 minutes with any "typing tutor"-type software. (I usually got annoyed and abandoned them when they chastised me for using the wrong shift key.) And I am most definitely capable of typing without looking at the keyboard, just so long as I don't think too much about it...

Answer 12

http://www.daskeyboard.com/ :)

Answer 13

gtypist is a free software typing tutor that works on the command line.

Answer 14

I trained mine here : http://keybr.com/ Surprisingly enough , after 8 or so years as a developer :)

Answer 15

I must admit way back, when I started playing MUDs in high school, my typing speed went through the roof.

It also got me into poking at more code and networking.

Answer 16

This site from the BBC is incredibly annoying... but for a while I used it to help with my typong skils.

Answer 17

Klavaro is a good program to learn touch typing.