Print out a big image of your keyboard layout and hang it on the wall in your line of sight where you type. Never look at the keyboard, only look at the image on the wall. It won’t take long to build the muscle memory this way.
This sounds like a good idea. How about getting a cheap projector to project a keyboard visualizer for immediate feedback and practicing?
Personally, I don’t think its needed. You can look at the screen for immediate feedback of what you typed and there are typing practice games which certainly help with good practice.
May i suggest : Mario teaches typing 2
…or Typing of the Dead…
edit- need to be quicker on the draw https://lemmy.world/comment/24752216
A cardboard box:
I remember my parents in the 90s using a tea-towel over their hands and keyboard
And put stickers on your keyboard. Start with a few on the home row and gradually expand once you don’t have to think about the location of the keys anymore.
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
https://www.keybr.com/ is a free 20 minutes a day practice tool that i tey to use daily. starts easy, then slowly ramps up to new letters for you to practice.
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.
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.
Playing a MMO.
You will learn where every button is. Or die trying.
In the 80’s we had games to learn touch typing that were very helpful and also quite fun, compared to old school methods.
Here’s a site that claims to have that sort of games:
https://www.typing.com/student/gamesWarning I have no idea if these are good, it’s just a random site a search came up with.
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.
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!
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
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.
