My laptops keyboard is completely black, with no letters on it. So even if i look down, its like staring into void lol

I type azerty

Yup, I can type about 90-100 wpm on a QWERTY keyboard if it’s normal conversational English. Probably half that if it’s something that contains a lot of long technical words. The thing that got me over the hump with getting good at typing was a game called QWERTY Warriors. It was a Flash-based web game that I was playing like 20 years ago, so I don’t know if it’s around anymore, but it was a tower defense game where you had to defeat enemies by typing the word underneath them. It was a pretty painless way to practice touch-typing.

Yes, but definitely not proper form, as my left hand rests on WASD+CTRL/Shift+Space.

I’m around 100 wpm, so maybe it doesn’t matter.

While I completely understand people who can’t get to 100 wpm (much like people at 110+ completely understand me), I cannot fathom young adults who cannot touch-type (barring disability, obviously).

Yes, QWERTY. My dad made my brother and I use Mavis Beacon as kids (SHOUT OUT TO MAVIS BEACON!!!) and I had keyboarding class in middle school. WPM is 70 to 80 depending on what I’m typing.

I learned to touch-type QWERTY in late 90s chat rooms. By 2006, I was bragging about my 100 WPM speed in my online dating profile. I met one girl who challenged me to a typing contest. She won, then I won, and then we called it a draw. We’ve been married for 13 years and had our third child last month.

When I was learning to touch type, I found it helpful to practice in my head even when I was away from the keyboard. Like whatever I’m thinking about, I’m picturing a keyboard in my head and where each letter of each word is. It slows my thoughts down a little, but that’s not always a bad thing.

I never managed proper training with the correct hands positioning so my hands are a bit all over the place. But years of Twitter, Reddit and online gaming (yeah, I was that type for some time) helped a lot so now I can type fairly quickly in both QWERTY and ЙЦУКЕН.

Yes. My kids would laugh at me when I worked from home because I would not stop typing when I looked up to answer something they were asking me. I suck on the phone keyboard but good with QUERTY big keyboard. My fingers can talk on those

Uh yes. If you can’t touch type, prioritize it. The speedup alone is worth it.

I recommend learning proper touch typing with the ‘correct’ finger position. Its benefit is that there’s proper movement for every finger for every key, which is mostly symmetric and very regular, and it gets ingrained in muscle memory. Hence typing anything is quick even if it’s not fast overall. The fingers ‘know’ what they must do for any letter, and it’s often faster to let them do their thing than to e.g. reach for the mouse. You can actually feel when you press a wrong key.

In case of a mistake, it’s faster to delete a few words and retype them than to move the cursor back and forth. And if you get an app like Alfred (for Mac) or Keypirinha (for Windows), you can invoke it with a shortcut and type a few letters faster than you open an app or click on some widget with the mouse — it’s often quicker to switch apps via Alfred than via cmd-tab. Likewise, when you use a keyboard-heavy app like Emacs, calling its commands becomes a breeze.

I’d like to use Dvorak or at least Colemak, but I’m concerned that all shortcuts would be messed up. Especially since I’m a user of Vim-style movements and commands.

Also, TIPP10 app is pretty nice for learning. No fluff, no extra stuff. Initially took me about a month to learn with half an hour or so a day, and about a year to fully get used to it and develop the speed.

Yes I can touch type after learning from keybr and then practice on monkeytype

Mostly, sometimes I have issues with thezxcvbnm row.

Yes. Parents made me learn touch-typing with QWERTY when I was growing up

I actually made the effort to switch to Colemak-DH less than a year ago. Because getting a properly labelled Colemak-DH keyboard is so difficult (my laptop keys are still QWERTY layout), I… basically forced myself to learn how to touch type in like 2-3 months. Still can’t do the multilingual symbols very well (I always forget where the ^/circumflex is…), but I think I have a >98% accuracy on everything else

Unfortunately I forgot how to touch type with QWERTY after learning the new setup…

My parents made me take typing lessons when I was in primary school. I had to learn on an extremely heavy electric typewriter with the keycaps taped off.
It was a lot of work but I’m still enjoying the benefits of it.
Fun little difference was that we used QWERTY, but the ‘;’ was replaced with a ‘ij’

I use DVORAK on my phone and after a day was faster than with querty.

I also use a keybeard called unexpected keyboard (via the fdroid app store) that does not have autocomplete but instead its really fast & still accurate to type non letters and numbers without holding the key down and wait and then choosing something. Also it can do shortcuts like ctrl+a, +c & +v which is quite pleasant

I touch type on QWERTY with a few variations from the standard. For example, I use right shift seldom, to type a capital A I shift my left hand over, hold shift with my little finger and strike A with my ring finger. the Y key I type with either hand depending on what else is going on with my hands at the time, and the rules I follow I don’t even understand, so most of those ergonomic split keyboards are no good for me. I don’t know if I type 6 or B correctly, I use the right hand for both.

I was given typing tutor programs as a child, I took a keyboarding class in 9th grade, in fact I was in that class when the planes hit the towers. My typing proficiency really came from Yahoo! and MSN. Turns out, teens will pick up a skill on their own if it’s useful for socializing with other teens.