this is what we used in the mid 90s. weird but worked.
one of the best things my parents did for us was make us learn to type
Mavis beacon
When I was in high school I was playing WoW when Wrath came out. I was doing a lot of PUGs so there wasn’t any coordinated voice chat so I HAD to type in order to communicate, so that’s when I really learned to touch-type.
Playing a MMO.
You will learn where every button is. Or die trying.
I used to be a hunt-and-peck typist. For me, first you have to build muscle memory for key fingerings, which key is pressed by what finger. Then you can start to get faster. Building a strong foundation first.
I would have this site open on one window: www.keybr.com
And this image on another for reference:
KeyBR has “levels” where you work on a specific set of letters first, until you’re fast enough and they give you the next set of letters, adding on to what you’ve already done.
Once you’ve completed all letters, you stop progressing and just type words with all letters.
For me, after my first completion of keyBR, I spent a day or so practicing at the “endgame.” After that, I’d restart the entire module from scratch, back to the individual letters. Rinse and repeat.
After about a month or two, I was already touch-typing.
Then I got really into monkeytype.com, and started typing faster and faster.
Every time you type a wrong key, hit that finger with a hammer. You’ll only need to do it once or twice before you’ve terrified all the fingers into only ever pressing the right keys.
They make games where you have to spell words quickly or you lose and that’s how I learned as a kid.
Like one where you’re in a spaceship and have to shoot lasers at asteroids that are coming at your ship. You have to spell the word that’s written on the asteroid to hit it with a laser.
Idk if any of them are free but they’re basically simple coded flash games so I’m sure you could find one on the internet pretty easily
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing! And Reader Rabbit. And Treasure Mountain (although that’s more math I think). Loved that shit as a kid.
Mavis Beacon motherfucker!
Good for you. I did not think typing was a skill that would be lost and so quickly. It boggles my mind they don’t teach it in school now.
1 Purchase The Typing of the Dead, the House of the Dead spinoff available for PC and Sega Dreamcast.
2 While TTotD is downloading or shipping go ahead and get some blacked out keyboard keys and install them.
Here’s the tricky part:
3 You have to learn to type or you will die.Older but Mario Teaches Typing https://playclassic.games/games/educational-dos-games-online/play-mario-teaches-typing-online/
Learned Colemak there, liked it. Unfortunately, no support for more niche layouts, like regional variants of Colemak.
Shit, I’ve checked it and now I’m thinking about learning a new layout. Thanks. Like I didn’t have enough things to do…
As a Colemak user I highly encourage people to learn a different layout. The thing that convinced me to Colemak was this: https://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/heatmap-keyboard/
Paste some long text you have written and it will show you a heat map on different layouts to see how the typing of that text on that layout would have been. I loaded a large code I was working on and Colemak was mostly home row.
Not that it matters that much for touch typing but while I can’t switch around keys in my external keyboard I can’t change it in my laptop. Did you simply accept it that keys don’t match your layout and move on?
If you have to look at the keyboard you’re doing it wrong. My main board had blank keys, my laptop has the qwerty keys, I just don’t look at them
I don’t have to look at it but sometimes I had to take my laptop to Desktop support for example and they wouldn’t be able to do anything with different layout. I don’t have any company laptop anymore so no longer a problem. Was just wandering.
If a support person can’t switch keyboard layout, I have absolutely no confidence they can fix whatever’s wrong with my machine.
Plus I use a tiling window manager with custom shortcuts, my keyboard is a split with blank keys and I use a trackball. I think it’s fair to say changing the keyboard layout would be a tiny step to overcome for anyone trying to use my machine hahahshs
The way I learned to type is by dividing my laptop screen into a left side, where I read, like the news, or Kindle, or some website I like, and a smaller right side that I don’t look at, where I type into Word, or simply Notepad. I went from zero to 60 words a minute fairly quickly. I’m so used to it now that I like to type the books I read. It helps me also because I’m a diagonal reader. Typing what I read forces me to slow down and assimilate more of what I’m reading.
My first recommendation is maybe consider a different layout. If you have been typing for long you will have muscle memory that will be hard to erase, I could mostly blind type (though not touch type) on qwerty, I decided to learn Colemak for touch typing and have never looked back. I still retain the muscle memory and can type somewhat fast on qwerty but after years of correct typing I notice just how bad what I was doing was.
IIRC I used https://thetypingcat.com/typing-courses/basic and trained on that and similar websites for a long time. You have to know that you will be very slow during a while and have to be prepared for that, but it does pay out in the end. While I didn’t increased my typing speed significantly (70 to 85) it is a lot less strenuous on my hands.
Typing.com is how I learned and recommend people learn
Then I use typeracer to have some fun
