Thanks for the article. You convinced me to look a second time how to change to Normal Style on Word, which didn’t use to have a keyboard shortcut (or I didn’t find it).
I found lots of good ones:
Ctrl-[] - Font size up/down
Shift-Ctrl-N - Normal Style
Ctrl-1,2,5 - Single, Double or 1.5 spacing
Shift-F3 - Change case between CAPS, lower and Sentence
Thanks for pushing me to learn them, I can now do most of the stuff I used to do with the mouse with the keyboard.
I have two majour problems with touch-typing in english:
Grr, 75.
flame Wtf, I got 97 wpm, English is not my natural language and I am not even a developer… You guys need some training 
Your points about typing are entirely valid, but one point I think you missed is that typing out code is not the same as typing out paragraphs of text. Code contains relatively large numbers of non-alphabet characters, which are not as easy to type. Additionally no-one types out code in one long block, you constantly jump around adding, tweaking, reading.
Beyond a basic ability to touch type, I do not believe there is a necessity to have a high wpm.
To be honest typing speed is a factor but is it really that a big issue. I guess it is hard to type fast and think fast. Something’s going to break. I am working on my typing but there is an unique problem here in Europe. WE have like 10 possible layouts of the keys here. And me going around from country to country and US keyboard is not always an option.
So keep on hitting those 80+wpm marks but I wonder if a application typed sp quick would actually compile.
I found a way in which programmers differ from typists:
click the Start the clock button, copy the sample text below
So I clicked, selected, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, stop. 4157 wpm and 103 mistakes :).
(102 wpm without errors on the first serious attempt though)
(also, seems I wasn’t the first one to use copy/paste :))
Personally, I don’t know any programmers who CAN type. I’ve always really liked your blog Jeff, but this is a BS post. Programming is not about typing. How fast do you need to type to write 15 lines of code/day!?
When I was in high school (late 60s, early 70s), typing class was recommended for all college prep students, and that’s where I learned – on massive mechanical typewriters that strengthened the fingers as well.
Years later – in the early 80s when PCs were being introduced into the insurance company where I worked – I discovered an interesting phenomenon: The intelligent women of my generation often had not learned how to type for fear of being shunted into secretarial jobs. They were suddenly at a disadvantage with the new technologies.
Broken clocks are right twice a day…
Not if they display AM/PM, they aren’t. It’s my imaginary clock, damn it, and I get to make the rules here!
A carpenter’s job is more than cutting wood, but would you hire one who only used hand saws because he didn’t bother to learn how to use power tools?
Non-typists won’t get this: typists write, while non-typists type and write. Typists don’t know they’re typing.
Would you ride with a driver who had to look at his hands every few seconds to find the wheel?
Let’s not forget how fast copy and paste is… I can type at 5432 wpm!
Just 42 wpm here. I did take a touch-typing course once, but I didn’t find it very useful.
It seemed to me that that the emphasis on placing your fingers on the home keys was more suited to English than code (e.g. curly braces end up on your right pinky, control and tab on your left pinky and the cursor keys are unreachable).
Are there any programmer’s touch typing courses that use different techniques?
At the moment I generally use two fingers and a thumb on each hand to type while while staring at the keyboard. This actually works okay but probably isn’t helping my posture!
Come on…cut him some slack…will you…
he meant broken digital blocks in 24Hr format…
Nice post BTW.
Jeff,
So I’m no one, and you’re big time, but I think there’s ONE thing that’s more important than touch typing.
I just blogged about it here:
http://adotnetdude.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-to-be-better-programmer.html
Let me know what you think.
Mm, I do not know how accurate the measurement is for me: 68wpm, 4 errors. Well, I do not mean technically accurate. Yes, I typed 68 words per minute and made 4 errors, but I am not sure how significant this is.
I was mostly hampered by reading the text. The text was more or less random rambling for me - random rambling with weird grammar and strange words I never heard of before, resulting in a quick huh? what is that?-pause, resulting in a pause while typing.
If I have to hack down a thought in python, this is different. I just know where I want to go, I know the structure and thus, I don’t have such Huh?-moments. Thus, I type faster when I type code and not random weird texts. I even measured this once using a traybar wpm-counter. When I was hacking a thought I just wanted to get hacked down, my wpm sped up to around 90 - 110 wpm, when I was just fixing things while thinking about it, it was at 20 and when I was thinking, it was 0
Thus, I think you are right to a certain degree. You need to be able to hack down a certain thought you have right now in your current language at high speed, so you can go to the next thought, yes; however, this does not imply that anyone who consciously types 30 wpm must be removed from the programmers pool.
It would be much more interesting to have a good tool that tracks your wpm during the day at work and throws some datamining at it in order to state right, you appear to have 3 modes of typing: one with 90 wpm, one with 20 and one with 0.
Greetings
DAMN!!..i get your point now…
i gotta be a good typist now that my joke is slaughtered…between thinking up the joke and posting it…
pedanticComment relevant=falseActually, analog clocks are right twice/day. Digital clocks may be right either once or twice per day, depending on the time shown and the convention followed (e.g. if time was being displayed in 24-hour format and the clock stopped at 08:44 the value is ambiguous and could be viewed as both 8:44 AM and 8:44 PM, whereas 20:44 is unambiguous)/pedanticComment
While I agree with your post Jeff, a few of the comments have me puzzled. Folks, it’s not how fast you type, but how much of your thoughts are devoted to typing versus problem solving. Blinding speed that produces unusable and unmaintainable code is still spewing…
Typing is a skill. For most of us it’s not our primary skill, but we should be reasonably competent at it in order to perform at a high level at our primary skills. Decathletes may not set records pole vaulting, but they have to clear the bar.
60 WPM Qwerty
47 WPM Dvorak.
I program at work in Dvorak, at home Qwerty (wife). I find programming much easier with dvorak, while typing text such as that test is easier with qwerty. I think it is mostly because of muscle memory. When learning Dvorak, I found that the hard part was relearning how to type words. With Qwerty I wouldn’t type f-r-o-m. I knew the muscle movements for from. As I use Dvorak more and more, I am getting better at typing with it. This test was a bunch of words I don’t need to use much at work (blood-red shimmering glory of the sun), so I can see why that score is a bit behind.
I think this is a great point, and definitely valid.
The root of it is that typing is an abstraction layer for what we’re really doing. The less barrier we have between our real task, and our conscious mind, the better. It’s the exact same phenomenon that prevents people with poor vocabulary from being excellent speakers and writers. They have to put more conscious effort into communicating their ideas, rather than having them flow out.
Let’s say you are raking leaves to clean up your yard. Now imagine if instead of raking up a pile of leaves (or using a leaf blower) you had to pick up 3-5 leaves individually and take them to the pile. This is what hunt-and-peck typists are doing. Good typists have a rake. Excellent typists have a leaf blower.