Typing
How we put our thoughts onto the computer screen.
Touch Typing
Over the last two weeks, I learned as much as I could about typing. The first stop on my journey was touch typing. Touch typing is a style of typing where each finger handles a specific set of keys. Each of your hands stays on the home row “ASDF JKL:” and to type, each finger moves to select keys in proximity. The major benefit is that once you have built up muscle memory, you can type without having to look at the keyboard, as well as having all eight of your fingers doing work.
When I started I had a typing speed of 32 Words per minute or WPM, this was using mostly my index fingers. The biggest area I wanted to change was my dependency on looking at the keyboard when I typed. I started by looking at guides on the proper typing. When I started typing “properly” my speed plummeted to a crawling 10 WPM. Re-building muscle memory from scratch was difficult, and I spent half an hour just trying to figure out how to type my passwords. I stuck to it, not allowing myself to go back to the old style, and within a week I had already gotten back to my original speed of 32 WPM. I did this by forcing myself to type properly whenever I was writing, not allowing myself to cheat even once. Also, I played “Epistory: Typing Chronicles” a story game designed to make you a better typist, using even my free time to better my typing. At the end of the two weeks, I got my typing speed up to 42 WPM.
The whole process was arduous and time-consuming, but now I've built up the muscle memory to be able to type on a keyboard with no legend. (printing on the key caps) I would encourage anyone to pick up touch typing. It is a time investment, but that investment is worth it. I wrote this entire blog without ever having to look at the keyboard.
While doing research for the typing, I went down several rabbit holes into unfamiliar elements of typing and keyboards. Here are a few of the main things I learned about.
Layouts
There are hundreds of different keyboard layouts, each of them alters the standard format in an attempt to make typing faster and more efficient. The layout you are probably using is QWERTY, named for the keys on the top left of the keyboard. QWERTY is the most common layout in English-speaking countries. While ubiquitous, QWERTY isn’t very efficient. One of the biggest problems that it has is the frequency that you leave the home row.
DVORAK attempts to solve this by having all vowels and the most common consonants on the home row, and putting the least used key on the edges. Named by its creator August Dvorak, the DVORAK layout is one of the more popular keyboard layouts. Moving almost every key to a new position, this layout can be very difficult to learn. There are other drawbacks, but the biggest is that it isn’t QWERTY. Because QWERTY has become so ubiquitous, most programs aren’t designed to work with these layouts. For instance, DVORAK scatters the Z X C V keys used for undo, copy, cut, and paste to random areas on the keyboard.
Colemak is another layout growing in popularity. Moving only 17 keys from their place on a QWERTY Colemak is able to keep 70% of typing on the home row. Z, X, C, and V are all in their original places. Colemak was one I tried. While relearning muscle memory isn’t easy, it was intuitive, and there weren’t many keys that just made little sense in their position.
The idea for each layout is to solve some problems with typing, but what if the keyboard itself is the issue?
RSI
The biggest ailment for typists is Repetitive Strain Injuries. Several issues can cause RSI, and unfortunately I'm affected by it. After typing for a long time, I noticed my arms hurt a lot. My brachioradialis, the muscle on the top inside of the arm near the elbow, would cramp up and be in pain. This meant I would have to take breaks even if I was approaching a deadline. While I could take a tylenol and be fine, if I’m in pain now, imagine what this would be like in ten years.
There are many keyboards that attempt to fix these problems. Using foot pedals, making the keyboard vertical, slanting or rotating sections of the keyboard and the list goes on. I settled on a “split keyboard” meaning that each half of the keyboard, the left and right side, are physically split into two half boards. This causes your arm to be at shoulder with apart, rather than being forced into a “v” shape. They were also tilted, meaning that my hands weren’t lying flat on the desk. The keys were also ortholinear, meaning that the keys were in straight lines rather than being staggered. This reduces how much side to side moving each finger has to do. The last area of change was to create a “thumb cluster” instead of your strongest digit pressing exclusively the spacebar. Each thumb gets four programmable buttons, offloading the work your pinky finger has to do. These four changes made an immediate difference in comfort. The muscle cramps went away.
