[HN Gopher] Keyboard lets people type so fast it's banned from t...
___________________________________________________________________
Keyboard lets people type so fast it's banned from typing
competitions
Author : zdw
Score : 347 points
Date : 2022-01-06 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| seagoj wrote:
| I could see this for prose, but this seems all but useless for
| programming. Even if you combined it with copilot or something I
| think the time you'd spend fixing what it presented would make
| you slower in the long run.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Instead of typing h e l l o, a chorded typer mashes h, e, l,
| and o to produce the word._
|
| So, no, it won't be typing "cadddr" for you in your Lisp code
| when you mash c, a, d, r. Probably, "card".
|
| Of course it's banned from typing competitions; you're not
| actually typing the word; the algorithm is.
|
| From the contest's point of view, it's morally equivalent to a
| regular QWERTY keyboard equipped with firmware that corrects
| typos.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Back in the 90's I worked with a guy who used a Dvorak. Any fans
| still out there?
| jmcphers wrote:
| Yeah, I used it for probably 6 years! Despite becoming very
| fluent I eventually came to the conclusion that the hassle of
| was not worth it.
|
| This was in the early 2000s and I had to use a lot of Windows
| and Remote Desktop, so there were at least several incidents a
| week in which the keyboard would start making the wrong letters
| and I had to figure out why. It doesn't help at all that
| Windows' default layout-switcher switches using Ctrl+Shift so
| any key combo that includes that pair (including select-by-
| word!) will swap your keyboard layout too.
|
| Sometimes I'd remote into a machine and after dozens of failed
| password attempts realize I was being treated to Double Dvorak,
| a much less well known layout in which the Qwerty -> Dvorak
| mapping is applied _twice_ , due to the map being loaded both
| locally and remotely. This is all w/o third party software,
| literally nothing more than Windows just not coordinating with
| ... itself.
|
| And finally, despite claims that Qwerty and Dvorak could be
| maintained at the same time, that wasn't true for me. The
| faster I got at Dvorak, the more speed and accuracy I lost on
| every other keyboard in the world I had to type on.
|
| So now I'm typing this on Qwerty. It ain't as comfortable, but
| the number of hours I spend each week trying to _get the
| computer to show which letter I 'm pressing_ is now zero.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| I switched to Dvorak when I bought a kinesis vertical keyboard.
| It's great. Much less strain.
| snuxoll wrote:
| Posted above: Been using Dvorak for 16 years now, but I didn't
| necessarily "switch" as I had been using a memorized hunt-and-
| peck style with QWERTY and needed to force myself out of that
| habit by removing my ability to fallback to that practice (so I
| had never properly learned to touch type before starting with
| Dvorak).
|
| I'll sing its praises until the day that I die - but it does
| have disadvantages in that most applications design their
| keyboard shortcuts and other inputs around QWERTY users. On
| macOS I can use the Dvorak-QWERTY Command layout to deal with
| this in particularly annoying cases, but there's nothing
| comparable I've found on Windows or Linux and that doesn't help
| with things like Vi.
|
| Not to mention I frequently find myself having to change
| layouts back in forth in games. A lot of games published even
| today have a nasty habit of using the character code instead of
| the keycode for keybindings, and I've gotten tired of redoing
| bindings in everything just to avoid pressing Windows+Space to
| change my layout. Additionally, since my keyboards still have a
| QWERTY layout of keycaps it makes it challenging when I get
| prompted to hit "Y" (which doesn't get used for important
| things usually as it's a stretch for the index finger from the
| ASDF position) and hit F by mistake since I look for the "Y"
| keycap on my keyboard - ditto when something prompts me to hit
| "F" and I hit "U" instead (basically the mappings between Q/'
| E/. F/U C/J V/K are easy enough as they're used often and are
| within natural reach, but once it goes outside these I start
| looking at keycaps and screw up).
|
| Anyway, I'll always highly encourage people to give alternate
| layouts a try and I'm never going to stop - but I'd say there's
| nothing wrong with using QWERTY either.
| warp wrote:
| Yup! I learned Dvorak probably in 1999 or early 2000s (and I
| have a coworker who also still uses Dvorak).
|
| The kind of people (like me) who got into Dvorak at that time
| would today probably learn something like Colemak DH, although
| there are many alternatives available nowadays and a big
| (discord) scene of folks optimizing and designing both their
| keyboards and the layouts they use on them.
|
| I expect Dvorak will die with people like me, because anyone
| willing to switch away from Qwerty is probably better served by
| other alternatives.
| jasone wrote:
| I disagree with your assessment that Dvorak has been
| obsoleted by other layouts. I used Dvorak 1998-2001, and
| again since 2018. Before I re-learned it in 2018 I did a
| bunch of research on Colemak, Workman, and the rich set of
| other optimized layouts people have created this century.
| There are compromises in every layout, and I came to the
| conclusion that Dvorak was within spitting distance of
| minimally pessimal, other named layouts less so.
|
| The caveat to my perspective is that I don't care where
| hotkeys are. I minimize mouse use, and with both hands on the
| keyboard it just doesn't matter very much. I've used emacs
| and vim with both layouts. My faded recollection with respect
| to emacs is that it was equivocal, and Dvorak is actually a
| bit better for vim.
| srcreigh wrote:
| I use Dvorak Kinesis Advantage 2.
|
| I switched to using copy and paste with the mouse with it since
| Cmd+c and Cmd+v are so hard to reach.
| snuxoll wrote:
| > I switched to using copy and paste with the mouse with it
| since Cmd+c and Cmd+v are so hard to reach.
|
| I don't use it myself - but on macOS there is a separate
| layout called "Dvorak - QWERTY Command" that shifts the
| layout to QWERTY when the command key is held to alleviate
| this issue.
| tombert wrote:
| I tried learning Dvorak about 9 years ago, and I got good
| enough for IMing and emails and whatnot, but I found it
| extremely difficult to context-switch between coding-editor
| keystrokes and conversational keystrokes. I know it has its
| fans, but I could never really get the hang of Vim with Dvorak,
| and I also didn't type any my emails any faster than I was with
| QWERTY, so I abandoned it and haven't tried Dvorak since.
| dannyz wrote:
| I use Colemak, but I don't really buy into any of the claims of
| improved comfort or speed. It took me somewhere between 1-2
| years to get to about the same typing speed as QWERTY
| (somewhere between 120-150 WPM depending on the test), and I
| have completely lost my ability to type QWERTY without looking
| at the keyboard. As others have said it is a big hassle when
| working on other machines or through things like remote
| desktop.
|
| That being said, I don't regret anything and Colemak is way
| more comfortable, for me. I never typed "properly" in QWERTY, I
| would use every finger on my left hand, but only two on my
| right hand. I started to notice some pain in my right hand and
| so I tried to retrain myself to type properly, but it never
| lasted more than a day because I was typing half the speed with
| proper technique. The only way I could force myself to use a
| proper typing technique was to just completely switch the
| layout.
| agurk wrote:
| I've been using it for 15 years or so. One of the tricks I use
| for getting around the problem other commenters here have is
| that I have bound my keycodes to be qwerty ones and (virtually)
| moved my key positions. This means if you set the OS to qwerty
| and type Dvorak the correct letters will be input.
|
| When working in offices I'd have my company supplied keyboard
| still plugged in as a guest keyboard so others could work with
| me seamlessly.
|
| This also came about as windows used to have the most
| ridiculous behaviour of setting the layout per window, so if
| you changed it when someone else came over you'd end up in
| typing hell. They thankfully fixed this to be a global setting
| a few years back.
| panda888888 wrote:
| I've used Dvorak for more than 15 years and love it. I'm
| "fluent" in QWERTY too but am faster in Dvorak.
|
| I also use it on my phone. Dvorak is terrible on swipe
| keyboards but I'm used to it.
|
| It was annoying to learn but I forced myself to power though my
| initially slow typing speeds, and it was 100% worth it. I
| highly recommend it.
| mellinoe wrote:
| I've used Colemak primarily for the past 5 or so years.
| However, the benefit is primarily in typing comfort and hand
| strain, not quite as much in speed, although it is probably
| marginally faster at its limits. I'm still fluent in QWERTY
| (I'm typing this message with qwerty to make sure it still
| works :)), so I can switch if needed, or if I'm using an
| unfamiliar computer (or a phone, etc). Moving to Colemak
| completely solved the frequent wrist and hand pain I got while
| typing using QWERTY. Others have had the same experience.
| samstave wrote:
| UH, you guys dont recall that this keyboard came out in the 80s?
|
| And it was designed so that you can have them on your thighs and
| type whilst standing with arms at relaxed hanging?
|
| I loved the idea of chorded-keyboards and I posted in the past
| about an engineer famous at intel for coding on them on his
| recumbant bike he would ride to the santa clara campus down san
| thomas expressway - connecting via a satellite phone and coding
| in binary in his head as he rode his boke and typed on these
| guys...
| mFixman wrote:
| Is it me, or does this article look suspiciously like an ad?
| cole-k wrote:
| On the one hand, yeah the "controversy" here seems rather dumb.
| It's banned from a website where people compare their typing
| speeds, big whoop. And the discussion about its possible
| advantage in games like Smash is similarly stupid, seeing as
| there already are similar controllers.
|
| On the other hand, it admittedly seems like it could be a nice
| development in consumer stenography. I'm only aware of open-
| source stuff like Plover, which I never got around to trying.
|
| I admit that if the sensationalism and fake drama were
| stripped, the article would probably read like a product
| endorsement. So I guess me saying, "I'm OK with ads if they're
| cool" is itself a dumb defense.
| xhevahir wrote:
| The idea of typing 500+ words a minute sounds silly to me. If
| you're writing in a natural language and you can touch type
| reasonably well, your typing skill is not going to be the
| bottleneck. Your speed at putting things into words is.
|
| Stenography or other data entry are an exception, of course, but
| I'm guessing the intended audience for these pitches is the
| average joe who dreams of writing an email in seconds.
| stakkur wrote:
| > "Chorded typing allows the users to input several letters at
| the same time and have a computer program generate a predicted
| word. Instead of typing h e l l o, a chorded typer mashes h, e,
| l, and o to produce the word. With practice, it's much faster"
|
| There's nothing wrong with this, and many of us probably use
| similar techniques daily (macros, shortcuts, etc.), but he's not
| typing 'words per minute' without computer help. So, makes sense
| it's considered 'cheating' for comparison purposes.
| aaronscott wrote:
| I looked into buying one a few weeks ago but ultimately decided
| not to move forward. One reason was that it comes with a pre-
| configured list of 500 chords, so it's up to users to create
| their own beyond the initial list. The other was that the build
| quality doesn't appear to be that great (with the PCB board
| clearly visible).
|
| The reddit community[0] has some helpful reviews and progress
| updates. And their discord server[1] is quite active with lots of
| helpful links and advice.
|
| 0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/charachorder/ 1 -
| https://discord.com/invite/jMj6grUuBc
| prirun wrote:
| "he did win another typing competition using the CharaChorder to
| hit 267 WPM with 76% accuracy."
|
| 76% accuracy doesn't sound so great to me, no matter how fast I
| can type on it.
| derefr wrote:
| If software used for typing competitions is anything like a
| typing test in a typing tutor program (which give similar WPM +
| accuracy measures at the end), then it would track the number
| of incorrect inputs you make, but also wouldn't let you proceed
| (i.e. would ignore all further input) while any incorrect input
| remains in the buffer. With such software, you're expected to
| correct each word you type before moving on to the next; the
| moment that you submit the _corrected_ word is the moment the
| word is acknowledged as "a word" counting toward your WPM.
|
| With such programs, the WPM score measures how many total times
| per minute you "finished" a correct word, including any time
| spent correcting the word; with the accuracy score measuring
| how much extra work was done, on average, doing those
| corrections.
| nosianu wrote:
| In addition to the other reply, if they did that the test
| would be so far from real world typing to be meaningless and
| nothing but an inconsequential curiosity.
|
| Only in tests is there an option to check against what is
| expected. In the real world you could at most apply some
| dictionary and grammar checks, and we know those can go
| either way. Those tools don't know what you actually wanted
| to write after all, and still suggest without comprehension.
| watwut wrote:
| In real world, there is check for typos - your eyes. You
| fix them after yourself.
| gowld wrote:
| Even if you type without making corrections, you still need
| to go back and make corrections, so you need an estimate
| for the time spent on corrections. Forcing corrections
| midstream is a decent approximation.
| Someone wrote:
| This doesn't work like that. It moves on to the next word the
| moment you type a space. Also, https://monkeytype.com/about
| says:
|
| _stats
|
| wpm - total amount of characters in the correctly typed words
| (including spaces), divided by 5 and normalised to 60
| seconds.
|
| raw wpm - calculated just like wpm, but also includes
| incorrect words.
|
| acc - percentage of correctly pressed keys.
|
| char - correct characters / incorrect characters. Calculated
| after the test has ended.
|
| consistency - based on the variance of your raw wpm. Closer
| to 100% is better. Calculated using the coefficient of
| variation of raw wpm and mapped onto a scale from 0 to 100._
|
| So, they assume the average word has 5 characters. Makes
| sense for computing wpm in random text.
| fragmede wrote:
| You can go back and delete errors, and also the default
| corpus is random words which probably average out to close
| enough to 5 characters. There are other modes which include
| punctuation and capitalization, as well as longer quotes to
| type, as well as expert and master modes (which fails you
| on a wrong word or character, respectively). I've never
| heard about this site before but it's pretty full featured!
| bluejellybean wrote:
| I've been active in my typing practice since I was about 4, and
| once I'm warmed up I can usually hit high 120s with 100%
| accuracy on unseen MonkeyType using a qwerty keyboard with red
| Cherry switches. If I ignore accuracy and go for 'raw' speed, I
| am able to achieve significantly faster WPM, typically between
| the range of 140s-180s. The issue I run into with programs like
| these is that I have to read/match the expected words. Even if
| I can see the words ahead of time and have a moment to try and
| memorize, I just go so slow trying to get the correct words. To
| contrast this, when I write for fun, and know what I want to
| say ahead of time, I'm fairly certain I'm able to burst into
| the low 200s (don't have a solid way to test to be sure
| unfortunately). Depending on the complexity of the error,
| Grammarly usually spits out correct solutions when I'm around
| that 75% error rate. The vast majority of the time I'm able to
| auto-correct everything with a single click. The only exception
| is when my hands drift and I end up typing something like
| 'gppnst' instead of 'foobar'. What I mean to get at is that
| it's somewhat dependent on the types of errors that are made.
| If it's easily auto-correctable errors at 75%, awesome, the
| person is hitting an incredible WPM, if instead it needs to be
| corrected by human thought, then I would completely agree with
| you.
|
| The real benefit to this speed/accuracy is that when writing
| long-form text, rather than say programming, the speed of
| typing can either match or exceed the thought process. There is
| a huge amount of utility in this approach and the keyboard
| becomes a true extension of the mind. I'm still waiting to find
| a good real-time auto-correct that doesn't screw with my flow
| at high WPM, I'd pay pretty good money to have something that
| just works out of the box.
|
| On a practical note, I've considered trying to hit the numbers
| that the author claims, but I'm already so limited by my own
| train of thought. With the additional finger/wrist strain (And
| yes, there is _significant_ strain when these levels are
| approached for any length of time) I just don't see the costs
| making sense when everything can be fixed in just a few clicks
| after typing a great many paragraphs of text.
| fouc wrote:
| I'm guessing that hands drifting only happens when you're
| really pushing for speed and get sloppy?
| greggsy wrote:
| > when I write for fun, and know what I want to say ahead of
| time, I'm fairly certain I'm able to burst into the low 200s
| (don't have a solid way to test to be sure unfortunately).
|
| What do you estimate your _actual_ WPM to have been when you
| wrote your whole comment?
|
| I find that it can take time to think about what I need to
| put down, and often need to edit and re-phrase for my
| audience.
|
| The whole WPM thing focuses on pure technical ability and
| ignores that there is more to writing than being a
| stenographer.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > An activity that it is easy to learn the basics of, but
| difficulty to gain proficiency in, may be described as having
| "a steep learning curve".
|
| It's the same for me. I doubt I can hit 200 WPM, but when I'm
| typing what I'm thinking (like right now) I'm significantly
| faster than when I type something I've never read, especially
| if it's just random words. On the other hand, I've never been
| much into measuring my WPM (I can type sufficiently fast for
| everything I need), so I just assumed this was a skill one
| can train to actually get those insane scores.
| patall wrote:
| Monkeytype also has a 'zen' mode where it measures the speed
| of you typing whatever you want.
| nawgz wrote:
| I just went on 10fastfingers and got 124WPM with 100% accuracy
| on the 60 second test. Can't say I'm impressed either - 2x as
| fast in exchange for far worse accuracy and use of a predictive
| layer is pretty bad overall.
| thepete2 wrote:
| Yes, that's terrible. The finished text was not corrected in
| that time, was it?
| [deleted]
| badlucklottery wrote:
| Yeah, way too low for programming but I wonder how low the bar
| is for modern autocorrect systems when writing English
| sentences.
| oolonthegreat wrote:
| one would think that programming requires especially low
| accuracy, since most of the things you type are either
| language-specific or previously defined.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| It depends on how it is calculated. If that is one in four key
| presses vs one in four words it is very different
| bombcar wrote:
| Interviewer: "I heard you were extremely quick at math"
|
| Me: "yes, as a matter of fact I am"
|
| Interviewer: "Whats 14x27"
|
| Me: "49"
|
| Interviewer: "that's not even close"
|
| me: "yeah, but it was fast"
|
| Shamelessly stolen, but yeah, 76% accuracy is only 3/4s of
| characters typed correctly; if that "works" you could probably
| just train yourself to not even _type_ the lesser used parts of
| the alphabet ...
| malshe wrote:
| Thanks for the chuckle!
| obert wrote:
| when taking notes a few typos are ok, e.g. "we got an avg of
| 14 complaints in our 27 stores" is "about 400 complaints" :-D
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| idk, wrds nt lke mth.
| cafard wrote:
| Back in the manual typewriter days, every typo subtracted 10
| WPM from your score. (Source: my junior-high typing class.)
| It seems to me that 76% accuracy would put you into negative
| WPM by that reckoning.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Since WPM is a rate, and total typos is an accumulated
| values, it seems that whether this would bring you negative
| is a function of the test length. Seem like it would make
| test scores not very portable.
| TehShrike wrote:
| I like TypeRacer's approach - your time includes the time
| it takes you to backspace to fix your mistakes and re-type
| it correctly.
| masklinn wrote:
| That seems optimistic, odds are your typing flow will be
| interrupted as tou think about the mistake and go around
| to fix it, plus you likely only realise it a bit later
| and need either some movement or to remove entire words
| and retype them.
| AQuantized wrote:
| I don't think it's bad for 'competitive' typing but it's
| nothing like the real process where fixing mistakes at
| the end is almost a triviality instead of completely
| derailing your typing.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Lik zis:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2o4rkq/english_to_be.
| ..
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| This is interesting to me not because of the typing speed but
| because of something almost everyone will find weird: As a
| developer I'm not a fan of typing due to health reasons.
|
| The long story: I have an undiagnosed disease/syndrome which,
| among other things, makes my fingertips become red and cold
| during winter season, and it gets worse when I'm typing. So in
| the summer I can pretty much type all day. It's not that my hands
| don't get cold while playing video games on my Playstation
| controller, they just get worst. I assume that the impact on
| every finger makes it worse, because I can wear all the layers of
| cloth in the house + have the air condition turned on and all I
| can get is my face and ears all red, but the fingers still cold
| as ice cubes.
|
| From my standpoint, I see the potential use as an accessibility
| tool. If I can write words and avoid the step where my fingers
| suffer the impact of every keypress that's a big win for me. It's
| not like I can't type (obviously) but I'm wondering if I could
| train myself to code using something like this to avoid
| discomfort. I once entertained the idea of using my PS4
| controller since Steam uses something similar.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Try going gluten free for 2 months. Seriously. Family member
| had issues like this and tried many docs. No results after lots
| of testing. Tried going off gluten for other reasons and
| everything cleared.
|
| To go gluten free, only eat foods that are certified gluten
| free. Anything with any kind of grain that is not certified
| likely has cross contamination.
| lima wrote:
| You probably already got checked for this, but just in case:
| this sounds like a textbook Raynaud's syndrome presentation.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Hmm, finally a chording device that doesn't look like total BS.
| I'm unwillingly intrigued.
|
| As for the underlying story, both sides are right. The chording
| device seems significantly better for text entry in terms of pure
| speed. But chording isn't typing, and it's typing, not text
| entry.
| xyoxyoxto wrote:
| torpfactory wrote:
| I don't think my problem is being able to get the words from my
| brain into the computer fast enough. My typical HID use case is
| composing meaningful written communication, a process which is
| unfortunately much slower than 500wpm.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Yeah. The sheer amount of button presses to write a 1k line
| script? That'd be roughly 10,000 words let's say, so 500 wpm
| would bang that out in a mere 20 minutes. Meanwhile the
| thoughts to compose 1k lines of code? That could take weeks of
| reasoning to deduce the proper logic.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| These days I type at about 80-90wpm which is not as fast as I
| once could (there was a point where I could achieve 130wpm on
| Dvorak but I was both younger and had less of a life). As is,
| though, it's very noticeable that I can type faster than I
| can actually compose text. I've also found that typing very
| fast tends to lead to a much higher rate of what I call
| "wordos," in which you mistype by completely swapping a word
| with another or omitting a word... these feel like symptoms
| of a sort of "buffer underrun" when typing that doesn't get
| noticed because I'm already having to move on to composing
| the next sentence.
|
| So yes, I think there's a significant effect of diminishing
| returns on very high typing speeds, and I'd take a guess that
| it starts really kicking in at something not that high like
| 60wpm.
| jhauris wrote:
| I consider typing speed the I/O of the operation. Sure there's
| some processing time while you think of what to type, but
| regardless of how long that takes, typing will slow it down
| further. I'm not perfectly parallelized in thinking/typing
| pipelines.
| nepeckman wrote:
| I agree with the analogy, but for me (and I think most
| people) processing time far exceeds IO. Once you get to a
| good enough IO speed, it doesnt make sense to optimize
| further, as the returns are diminishing.
| willhinsa wrote:
| For programming, I can see that, definitely. But when I'm
| writing an essay, there are many times where I can't type
| as fast as I can think, and it drives me nuts. I end up
| resorting to using a voice recorder and transcribing it
| later. Because sometimes the ideas can come out quickly,
| but it's still easy to forget them if they're not written
| down.
| dathinab wrote:
| For programming I only see this if you have a language
| with a lot of unnecessary overhead (not in the syntax but
| in what you need to type out) no (good) IDE or only solve
| mostly memorized leet code problems, or only write pretty
| brain dead code the 100ed time (in which case you could
| optimize it away with code-gen).
|
| For other thinks I don't see this, not because I think
| slower then I type. But to some degree thoughts and
| typing are out-of-sync and while each though is faster
| then a typing, for much code you have one thought about
| how to type it, but also many more about contexts of your
| solutions and interaction with other code and what you do
| next etc. you type. And I don't think increasing typing
| speed would change this much. Except if I increase it to
| a point where I now need to fully focus on typing, which
| would be counter productive.
|
| TL;DR: I type and thing, not type then think then type.
| (Though biologically seen I maybe don't do it actually in
| parallel but micro-task like how multi-threading on a
| single core non SMT system works, but it doesn't matter
| much for the end result.)
| anoplus wrote:
| I think the more significant I/O trend would be ai guessing
| your intentions. The program will know the user so well it will
| be effectively mind reading.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I'm more curious what the ergonomics are like on this device and
| how it compares to keyboards like the Kinesis Advantage for
| preventing injuries.
| xyoxyoxto wrote:
| olliej wrote:
| Is it a chording keyboard? because those hav existed for decades,
| and are demonstrably faster for typing. They just have a steeper
| learning curve.
|
| Follow on question: does anyone know how court stenographer
| keyboards work?
| omot wrote:
| Is the bottleneck the keyboard or my mind? Not sure if having
| faster keyboard is all that helpful day to day.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Keen also claimed that he'd won several online gaming
| competitions using the CharaChorder, which he says brings up an
| interesting ethical dilemma. "I'm not sure if there's any
| restrictions on what keyboards you're allowed to use," he said
| over a video of him playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on the
| Nintendo Switch, using his CharaChorder running through a XIM-
| style adapter.
|
| As someone who's somewhat familiar with eSports, I'm having a
| hard time imagining what game would let this style of keyboard
| provide a substantial advantage, and I'm very skeptical of these
| "online gaming competitions" he supposedly won.
| ericpruitt wrote:
| Check out https://youtu.be/Lw1tcqbFwN4?t=867 which talks about
| some of the advantages of stickless controllers. That link
| points to a particular timestamp, but the video as a whole is
| pretty interesting IMO.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I'm aware, I just don't see how this would provide an
| advantage over already existing methods like hitboxes, or
| regular keyboards.
| ericpruitt wrote:
| Your original comment read "keyboard provide a substantial
| advantage" without specifying an advantage over what, so I
| assumed you meant an advantage of the most commonly use
| controllers, not advantage over other stickless
| controllers. Even ignoring that, stickless controllers are
| still very much a minority, so an advantage over
| traditional controllers would still be a large advantage
| over the pool of competitors especially at lower levels.
| ericschn wrote:
| There has been conversation happening regarding tournament play
| legality of digital input controllers for the Smash Bros games,
| most notably Super Smash Brothers Melee.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smash_Box_controller
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yes, but things like regular keyboards, or hitboxes already
| exist. How does this new thing improve on those?
| mjh2539 wrote:
| Is this wireless? I've always thought it would be cool to be able
| to walk and type at the same time. I always seem to get great
| ideas while walking and it's tedious having to stop and write
| them down.
| mminer237 wrote:
| I always just dictate a note in Keep on my phone. I don't think
| there's a more effective mobile note-taking system.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Is there any reason you wouldn't use a standalone pocket sound
| recorder, or alternatively the sound recorder app on your
| phone?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Will take me 2 years to learn this that's more than the time
| saved in my life time to type a bit slower
| scoofy wrote:
| When i switched to dvorak, i quickly realized that the main
| benefit i got was improved comfort, not a ton more speed. My
| point is only that one should focus on comfort with any keyboard,
| especially when you're using it multiple hours per day.
| caslon wrote:
| Chording input devices hardly count as keyboards. It's not even
| that it's fast, it's that it's an entirely different paradigm of
| input. Stenography is an entirely different skillset than typing.
|
| According to its website, the device mentioned in the article
| basically serves as a device that does autocorrect on top of
| traditional chording, which is quite literally cheating in
| _typing_ competitions.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| > article basically serves as a device that does autocorrect on
| top of traditional chording
|
| This is normal for chording input devices. Both old-school
| stenography machines and modern steno software like Plover are
| context-sensitive to consecutive inputs.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| typing speed is rarely the limiting factor on productivity. HN
| can be though. get back to work.
| passivate wrote:
| Agreed, I don't think editing text has ever been a bottleneck
| for developers at any point of time. The vast majority of time
| is spent on reading, thinking, discussing, explaining, and
| debugging code. This is also why I rue the time I wasted
| learning vi.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _Instead of typing h e l l o, a chorded typer mashes h, e, l,
| and o to produce the word. With practice, it's much faster_
|
| If this works like swipe typing on phones, you'll type blazingly
| fast, but you have to retype each word several times until the AI
| finally guesses the right one.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Maintaining such typing speeds look like a recipe for burnout to
| me. I think I could even see the CEO's hands trembling in the
| TikTok when he lifted them from the device after demonstrating
| 500 WPM. It certainly incurs a massive cognitive load, perhaps
| similar to what professional classical musicians can pull off--
| and they don't have invent the score at the same time as they are
| performing.
|
| Someone capable of decent touch typing on QWERTY will hardly
| benefit from the additional typing speed IMHO; at least not when
| factoring in the time spent learning, and the inevitable decrease
| of typing speed on QWERTY keyboards which will be very hard to
| avoid when working in a team or multiple locations.
| Dig1t wrote:
| All of this seems like an advertisement. It does seem pretty cool
| though if you have a need to be able type a lot of text really
| fast; I don't think most programmers need to type fast though. My
| daily work as a programmer is like 5% typing code and 95% talking
| to people and thinking about things.
| jtsiskin wrote:
| Fascinating. This is the first article I've read where the source
| is exclusively tiktok videos
| ycIsGarbage wrote:
| jedberg wrote:
| And Discord.
| kmlx wrote:
| Keen, CEO of the keyboard company, is mentioned several times.
|
| At the end of the article:
|
| > Keen did not return Motherboard's request for comment.
| amelius wrote:
| After reading only the headline, I'm not surprised.
| DrBoring wrote:
| I wonder how effective this CharaChorder is at preventing RSI
| (repetitive stress injury). It still seems to have the same flaw
| as QWERTY in that it requires you to use your small finger
| muscles, which are more prone to RSI than say your biceps.
|
| ps: Ugg, vice.com. I don't care for them.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| twitching your fingertips left and right seems like a terribly
| unnatural repetitive motion to me, I would be concerned.
| feisar wrote:
| I think the idea is good but if its auto-completing and
| readjusting as you go I dont think your even typing properly.
|
| Just my 2 cents.
| mhb wrote:
| _...he did win another typing competition using the CharaChorder
| to hit 267 WPM with 76% accuracy._
|
| Isn't this accuracy abysmal?
| jjice wrote:
| If my accuracy was 76%, I'd be upset. I'd definitely work on
| accuracy over raw speed at that point.
| angio wrote:
| Yes, IIRC stenographers in the US are required to type 225 WPM
| with 98% accuracy.
| pipework wrote:
| This reminds me of the speedrunning community 'any percent'
| ladders and how anything goes to get to the finish. Such a grind,
| but very specific applicable knowledge, and no meaningful
| generalizable growth at the end to bring to another game.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| The picture up top is upside down..
| tombert wrote:
| Has anyone tried this with coding? It looks like this is very
| focused towards writing English, which is fine, but as someone
| who spends a good chunk of my day around code editors, a keyboard
| that is crap for code editing is a non-starter.
|
| However, if it's good for that, I will probably be buying one.
| rappatic wrote:
| He posted an earlier video on his TikTok account showcasing the
| device's coding capabilities. I don't know if the videos he
| posts are entirely reliable (eg. as another commenter
| mentioned, he claimed a 500 wpm typing speed by typing one
| memorized sentence). I do know that it needs autocorrect
| (built-in) to work at high WPM which doesn't seem great for
| coding which might use nontraditional words and spellings.
| Personally it seems like it would be too great a learning curve
| for not enough benefit, given that no software is designed for
| devices like these. Maybe if this somehow takes off in the
| future.
| tombert wrote:
| I'm gonna bite the bullet and buy one, I think. I'm ok with a
| "good enough" coding experience, and I never bought myself a
| Birthday/Xmas present last year. This will work.
| a-dub wrote:
| i don't think there's anything to gain here that you don't
| already get with good autocompletion.
|
| i wonder how a trained stenographer on a chorded keyboard would
| compare to a trained typist with a good english language model
| backed autocomplete and a ui built for speed on a classic
| qwerty keyboard.
| tombert wrote:
| I'd be ok with it being "as good" as my current coding setup,
| at least if it improves my other typing speed. A _vast_
| majority of my correspondence these days involves me typing
| (as I 've made , so being able to speed that up would still
| be cool, though I doubt it's going to be a categorical
| difference in my day-to-day life.
| a-dub wrote:
| curious how it will work out. you'll have to learn new
| chords for the standard alphanumeric characters and then a
| chunking/chording scheme where the space of chunking
| schemes and associated chords for computing and coding is
| vast.
|
| my understanding is that classic stenography is actually
| phonetic. so the chords match up to phonemes or phoneme
| like chunks which are then postprocessed to reconstruct
| english text.
|
| a new approach using english language could be more data
| driven. a simple mapping could be one chord to one word
| with words sorted by frequency and easier chords assigned
| first. more complicated approaches involve chunking up the
| words into frequently used chunks and then doing the same.
|
| code is harder, there are frequently reused strings, but
| they change from technology to technology. overall there is
| far more entropy in computing than english on a character
| by character level, so designing a chording scheme that is
| more efficient and isn't tied too much to a specific domain
| is actually a really hard problem, especially once you
| consider that the effectiveness of a given scheme is not
| only a function of how well it fits the problem (how often
| the user is actually entering things the scheme was
| designed for) but also how well users are able to learn the
| vocabulary of chords and the dexterity to execute them
| quickly.
| ekimekim wrote:
| > chorded typing allows the users to input several letters at
| the same time and have a computer program generate a predicted
| word. Instead of typing h e l l o, a chorded typer mashes h, e,
| l, and o to produce the word.
|
| It sounds like it relies heavily on autocomplete, which means
| it's unlikely to be useful for coding instead of just English
| text.
| cwp wrote:
| No, that means it's likely _very_ useful for coding instead
| of English. You just need a custom dictionary. Code has a
| smaller vocabulary than prose, even with the domain-specific
| words that get used as identifiers . You could probably do
| pretty well with a dictionary that just has all the keywords
| in your favorite language, plus some common variable names.
| Heck I bet it 'd be a win just to make the punctuation used
| in code have convenient chords.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Seems like it would be better to have the device be
| dictionary agnostic and leave it to your editor do know
| whether you're writing a comment, or code, or a string
| containing sql...
| tombert wrote:
| I wonder if it would make sense to latch into the syntax
| highlighter for something like Vim. Most syntax
| highlighters have a reasonable understanding of what
| context you are currently in, so conceivably the device
| could, for example, see that I'm inside a comment and
| revert to vanilla English, and then see that I'm back in
| code and change to F#.
| mpwww wrote:
| Looking at the CharaChorder Lite version -- can't this be done
| via software implementation with a n-key rollover keyboard?
|
| I'd like to try it but not $200 like to try it.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Cool but who needs this? I'd rather see a keyboard that limits
| you to 10 WPM so you are forced to think before you type
| maxbond wrote:
| I've never completed the leap to a chordal interface, but my
| interest in them is about ergonomics, not speed. For instance,
| a habit I had to break to avoid hurting myself on the keyboard
| was rotating my hands to reach a key. This is simply not a
| problem on chordal keyboards.
| jamamp wrote:
| Transcribers would probably appreciate it. But then again,
| there are other regular stenographic keyboards out there.
| ars wrote:
| Not everyone thinks _while_ typing. I do all my thinking ahead
| of time, then I just need to record it on the screen after I 'm
| done.
|
| I'm usually thinking of other things at that time, since I just
| need to transcribe the words in my head, not think about them.
| gowld wrote:
| How much text do you memorize before you type a round?
| ars wrote:
| It's not a specific amount, and it's not memorization of
| specific words, it's more like assigning a sub-processor
| the task of converting the ideas into typing, while the
| main brain moves on to other things.
|
| You've never had that with programming or other tasks? You
| think and figure out what to do, and then it's just a
| matter of getting the idea down on paper (or computer).
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| This seems more my style too.
|
| I notice that I can listen to rap and write code this way,
| but if I shift to trying to write a comment or a docstring
| then I just get stuck. Its like all English circuits are
| busy, please hold. But the effect goes away when I know the
| lyrics very well.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Sometimes it's useful to be able to run a series of quick
| experiments, each based in some complex way on the outcome of
| the previous ones, to develop an empirical understanding of how
| something is working.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| >You may soon see that coworker with the weird monolith style
| trackball mouse rocking this strange peripheral and claiming he's
| upped his efficiency in ways you can't possibly imagine.
|
| Since coding is 20% sitting in meetings, 50% reading code, 10%
| drawing on whiteboards or sticky notes, 15% drinking coffee, 4.5%
| fighting impostor syndrome and 0.5% actual typing, I think I am
| quite safe with my good 'ol QWERTY.
| gowld wrote:
| You type a lot more than 0.5% of the time.
| romwell wrote:
| It's a trade-off between spending some time _thinking_ about
| what should be written, and then typing a little - or
| spending all the time typing, typing, typing, and rewriting.
|
| I don't think I've ever been in a job where I was limited by
| _typing_ speed.
| jldugger wrote:
| Then you should definitely consider switching keyboard
| layouts to reduce RSI. I did, last week. Going from 80wpm
| to 30 wpm is definitely a job impediment (in the short
| term). So many things are keyboard driven:
|
| - communicating with peers over slack
|
| - writing code / git commands
|
| - writing email, comments in HN, documentation, etc.
|
| - taking notes in meetings
|
| - all the browser shortcuts
|
| - all the CLI readline shortcuts
| shard wrote:
| Yes. I've love to be able to type fast enough to take
| notes so that I don't have to try to read my chicken
| scratch handwriting and figure out what the hell I was
| trying to write, especially when referring to notes where
| I don't have any recollection of what the contents were.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I'm typing even less these days with tools like copilot.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| For some reason I don't like any of this automation tools.
| I find VSCode unbearable even without copilot. Too many
| things happen when I type. I prefer linting and that's
| about all I want to write my code peacefully. I use vim in
| iTerm and it's all I ever need. Jump off to Pycharm to
| debug if needed.
| genidoi wrote:
| About 3-5% of the time, copilot poops out an unexpectedly
| clever code block that makes it worth it to me, if
| nothing else but for the surprise factor.
|
| For the remaining 95%... I've configured it to delay
| doing anything until 10000ms passes so it doesn't get in
| the way
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I use vim quite a bit too, just sayin...
|
| https://github.com/github/copilot.vim
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Oh boy..., I guess there are people who find this useful.
| I respect "To each their own" and "You do you".
|
| I also like using Sublime Text with vim keymap. I prefer
| the low latency of editors over features of big IDEs.
| Sometimes, I do use PyCharm or CLion for debugging since
| that experience in vim sucks. GDB is terrible in CLI.
| watwut wrote:
| Yes, but typing speed is still not too important.
| stickydink wrote:
| There is some threshold where it absolutely impacts
| productivity. If you haven't seen this in action, you're
| lucky, I've ran into more than one Engineer who is
| otherwise very smart but somehow never learned to type.
| jjice wrote:
| For sure. If you're a hunt-and-peck typer, it makes
| meetings where we're waiting for someone to finish typing
| unbearable. If you're even somewhat competent at typing,
| then I don't think it's a big pain point.
| angio wrote:
| I'm glad I'm a fast typer because I can spend less time
| replying to pointless emails.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| I also spend less than 15% of my time drinking coffee.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Not an amount of time where typing more efficiently is going
| to matter. Once you hit intermediate competency it stops
| mattering.
| dmux wrote:
| I'm having difficulties finding the source right now, but I
| remember reading a story about a sysadmin that was berated for
| his typing speed and the story ended with him replying "I don't
| get paid to type code fast, I get paid to press enter very,
| very slowly."
| Aperocky wrote:
| playing the devil's advocate, typing speed is important for
| these reasons:
|
| 1. It allows for minimal disruption to thinking process,
| close to 90% of the time even when coding is not actively
| typing, but when typing is subconscious and fast it removes
| the potential of where it interrupts the thinking process.
|
| 2. While this has no bearing on individual case (It would be
| Bayesian, some people consider that to be heretic), but a
| software engineer who does not type well have a greater
| chance of having had less practice.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > It allows for minimal disruption to thinking process
|
| Willing to dive into this a bit more? My personal
| experience is different so I figure this is a chance to
| learn something new. The subjective character of typing
| experience for me is like riding a bike, driving a car,
| walking, or speaking. That is to say that unless I'm
| mountain biking, off-roading, on a balance beam, or trying
| to say a tongue twister, for the most part I'm unaware of
| the intention-execution-results loop, and the intention-
| results loop is all that consciously exists. My paltry
| 50-60wpm doesn't feel like an impediment to putting
| thoughts into text, but maybe others feel differently.
| Sosh101 wrote:
| Haha brilliant.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| The amount of time I spend typing in Slack alone is FAR greater
| then 0.5%, plus writing docs, tickets, PRs, writing code, etc.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Even if you're not wrong, this is a disappointing attitude.
| There are so many reasons to want to improve user interfaces -
| reducing RSI, reducing error rates, increasing speed, etc. I
| love seeing new designs where people are trying to improve the
| state of the art even if I don't plan to use this immediately .
| kraftman wrote:
| your missing replying on hacker news, chatting on slack,
| chatting on whatever othe rchat program you use, etc.
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| That's the real use case here, get your comments out faster
| on hacker news than everyone else!
| kristjansson wrote:
| Where else does one learn to _really_ type quickly besides
| hurrying messages into a game chat?
| steelstraw wrote:
| I wonder how much of Carmack's time is spent typing. It'd be
| fascinating to get an idea of that.
| neysofu wrote:
| Most of the advantage in alternative layouts is improved
| comfort and less injury-prone finger movements. Faster typing
| speed is basically a nice side effect.
| lmilcin wrote:
| You forgot typing documentation, emails and chatting on Slack.
|
| Also, you might be underestimating how dumb it looks to both
| technical and non-technical people when a highly paid engineer
| can barely type.
|
| Not that I've seen many who type slowly, probably because
| that's something you just pick up after decades of work.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| And most emacs users write programs that type repetitive
| patterns for them anyway
| [deleted]
| 0kl wrote:
| I think things like this are not "everyone must use this new
| better way of typing," but more "hey there may be a better way
| of doing this task."
|
| I am always surprised, though at this point I shouldn't be,
| that there is always pushback against any attempts at improving
| the status quo when it comes to typing speeds on HN - as though
| the creator is attacking all of us with lower typing speeds
| personally...
|
| From another perspective: sure you might speed up only 0.5% of
| your workday - but how is that a bad thing?
|
| Repetitive stress injuries aside, even if you only spend an
| hour a week typing (I suspect it's honestly more) then if you
| end up increasing your typing speed by double you're still
| saving yourself 25 hours a year. Assuming my a career of 35
| years that's 875 hours and you increase your time fighting
| imposter syndrome by 0.25%.
|
| Scale up as appropriate for how much time you actually spend
| typing.
| jaqalopes wrote:
| A lot of people are expressing doubt about the utility of faster
| typing speed--rightly so, since that is the focus of the article.
| However, as a prose writer, I'm actually quite excited about this
| kind of device. When I'm typing 50,000+ characters of prose per
| week, every week, that's a lot of finger strain with a QWERTY
| keyboard--and I feel it. If a device let me accomplish that work
| with less net impact on my hands, even if it wasn't any faster, I
| would embrace that in a heartbeat.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Split keyboards have done wonders for me. But a different
| keyboard alone won't solve the strain problems. A combination
| of using an ergonomic typing device, exercise, regular breaks
| and time off the keyboard are essential.
|
| When you already feel the strain it's high time to do something
| against it, damage might already be done. Carpal tunnel or
| other inflammations are really painful and can take months to
| recover, during which your productivity will be quite low.
| Better to type only 40,000 characters a week and give your
| hands some rest, than squeeze 50,000 out of them until the
| damage is done.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Did you try voice transcription?
| dathinab wrote:
| This is probably the best advertisement they could get ;=)
|
| Not saying that it's bought or anything, just that as a company
| focused on a value-delivering-product such articles are just
| awesome.
|
| Especially when the article only focused on your good sites.
|
| (No ideas about bad sites, but price ($250, not absurd for that
| market), compatibility with less usual hand-forms, and it not
| fitting well with a travel laptop setup (more size needed) are
| probably some).
| umvi wrote:
| The "500 WPM" video is a little suspect. He types literally one
| memorized sentence and extrapolates a WPM from that one 10 word
| sentence. I'd like to see him actually type 500 meaningful words
| in under 60 seconds.
|
| Anyway, this is cool but basically just a modern stenography
| device. Steno has a learning curve problem that makes it so most
| people won't use it.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| People are getting too hung up on the "500 WPM" part. He's not
| saying he can type 500 WPM. He's saying that he scored 500 WPM
| on a specific typing task and he's doing it intentionally. He
| gets to say he typed 500 WPM and the website that's flagging
| him as a cheater has to be the one to explain why which just
| gives him more promotion.
|
| It's not about how fast he's typing. It's about being able to
| say that his product is significantly faster than everything
| else.
| ehsankia wrote:
| To me, it comes down to this line:
|
| > have a computer program generate a predicted word
|
| Do steno devices do this? This right there easily disqualifies
| it from competitions. It's like using the keyboard
| autocomplete. If you're using a machine to predict and
| correctly type the word for you, it defeats half the point of
| typing competitions, which is specifically about typing words
| without typos. The majority of time lost in these typing races
| is when you make a typo and have to go back to correct it.
|
| Also, separately, I know HN skews more towards pogrammers, and
| I feel these keyboards wouldn't be very useful for that.
| RubyRidgeRandy wrote:
| stenography involves shorthand. This is what a stenographer
| is actually typing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Steno-
| example.gif
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I'd say it's a lot suspect. Couple this with the fact that he
| scored 267 WPM with 76% accuracy in another competition. Until
| we see more and it gets more accurate I'm not sure typing this
| fast is very meaningful if I'm going to have to fix 24% of what
| I just typed.
| zck wrote:
| I bet the 76% accuracy is coming from the CharaChorder's
| input method. From its website
| (https://www.charachorder.com/product-page/charachorder):
|
| > CharaChorder's internal processor arranges the letters on-
| screen in real time faster than the human eye can perceive.
|
| So if it inputs one word, deletes it, and writes a new word
| every time you press a new letter, that would result in some
| decreased accuracy, even if the user doesn't ever correct
| anything.
| kmonsen wrote:
| could they not do that on device and only spit out the
| correct characters when it feels certain?
| zck wrote:
| I don't see why not. The UX would not be as good, though.
| Accacin wrote:
| Yeah, this thread is full of people who didn't take enough
| time to read anything. We're all too quick nowadays to get
| angry and type without thinking, sadly.
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| They're typing too quick with their CharaChorder. :-)
| darkwater wrote:
| > We're all too quick nowadays to get angry and type
| without thinking, sadly.
|
| Well, CharaChorder won't exactly help with that...
| [deleted]
| dkersten wrote:
| Yeah, I don't buy it either. I can type very quickly, but what
| brings my WPN down substantially is loading what I want to type
| next into my mind. Eg on typing speed tests, I can write the
| first sentence (if I can see it before the timer starts) much,
| much faster than the rest, because I can pre-memorize it. Later
| ones require me to multitask: read ahead while my fingers are
| still typing previous sentences, and this is much slower for
| me. If I memorize and practice a short sentence, I bet I could
| reach an extrapolated 500 WPM on my Kinesis Advantage with the
| Colemak layout with a few days of practice.
| kragen wrote:
| I look forward to hearing your results. I think you'll reach
| the 140-190 wpm range that way, not 250 or 350, and
| definitely not 500.
| blackearl wrote:
| It says he competed at 267wpm in the article. The monkeytype
| site totally bans 300+ so I think that's still very impressive.
| deepspace wrote:
| Yes, but at only 76% accuracy. If you were to include the
| time spent on going back and correcting mistakes, I bet he
| would be down in the 50-100 wpm range, if that.
| lukevp wrote:
| Yes but the accuracy percentage is low because the software's
| essentially guessing what he's typing (not unlike swype
| keyboards + autocorrect on a phone though implemented
| differently). It would be way slower to correct errors and
| type at 100% accuracy because each error has to be corrected
| based on some cognitive process (like looking at autocorrect
| suggestions for example) which is far far slower than
| correcting a typo in a QWERTY keyboard. I can type around 110
| WPM with 95% or higher accuracy and I can also feel the
| majority of typos I make and correct them without active
| thought.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| "with 76% accuracy" - I'm surprised typing competitions even
| allow scores below some accuracy level, e.g. 95% or so.
| Missing every fourth letter means it's basically
| gobbeldygook, and if you were actually typing anything where
| you even needed to be remotely accurate you'd spend at least
| 2x as much time revising.
| voxl wrote:
| The accuracy measurement is flawed, because the firmware of
| the device is deleting chorded letters and retyping the
| chorded word, which artificially reduces accuracy
| umvi wrote:
| If it's happening at the firmware level why wouldn't it
| just resolve the word internally and output only the
| completed word to the PC?
| liamwestray wrote:
| Yes. It's actually artificially increasing accuracy.
| nikanj wrote:
| Based on that video, it's more of a macro keyboard. Assign each
| of the ~10 words to a button, click buttons in order, claim
| 500WPM
| xondono wrote:
| No it's not, there's another video explaining, the keys are
| "2d joysticks" type switches, so typing doesn't involve
| removing the fingers at all.
|
| I would think it takes a lot of time to get used, but seems
| like a smart approach for speed.
| disiplus wrote:
| https://youtube.com/shorts/ZCtn5ROOdmY?feature=share
| nikanj wrote:
| The performance in that video is nothing like the
| performance in the 500 WPM video. Accuracy is well under
| 100%, and he seems to be actually inputting random words
| - not just macroing a pre-defined phrase.
| Accacin wrote:
| I don't mean to be rude, but did you even watch it? He
| explains the firmware deletes a word when it detects a
| chord which skews the accuracy.
| dathinab wrote:
| It works without steno, too.
|
| Like you can take a look at their quick reference guide shown
| in the "coder" section of their website.
|
| I don't know how well it will work but it looks viable.
|
| The think I'm mostly worried about is that most human fingers
| (not thumbs) aren't really designed (or trained) for sideways
| movement. Does anyone has the necessary anatomy knowledge to
| know if this has a increased risk to cause health issues if
| used long term as the main keyboard?
| ouid wrote:
| well that and the fact that this is transparently an
| advertisement masquerading as journalism.
| fouc wrote:
| This article reads as a PR piece to promote that specific
| product.
|
| No mention of Plover or http://www.openstenoproject.org
| [deleted]
| tpmx wrote:
| The video from the product site makes it clear that it's not
| really typing. More like matching chords to a rather small list
| of words:
|
| https://www.charachorder.com/
|
| Great for tiktok demo videos I guess.
| shard wrote:
| I suppose then we are getting into the nitty gritty of what
| the definition of typing is. Typing to me is entering text
| data. For me, if I use something like Swype on my phone,
| where I don't even have to hit the actual letters I am trying
| to type, I would still call it typing. This device looks like
| it's matching a chord made up of the majority of the letters
| of a word to the expected word. I would still call that
| typing. Just like driving with adaptive cruise control, lane
| keeping assist, and automatic emergency breaking would still
| be called driving for me.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| I can type the word "a" at 1000 WPM!
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| That's 32 keystrokes per second, I'm impressed. Unless you're
| using vim, in which case a minute is a long time to type: `ia
| <esc>0d$1000p`
| jameshart wrote:
| No, it's one keystroke, executed in 1/32 second.
| lrdd wrote:
| Or quicker: 1000ia<esc>
| lomaprietasolo wrote:
| No you can't.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I used to have a pretty high WPM, above 120 if my memory
| serves. You can only sustain that speed if you're working from
| memory or directly copying text (as is the norm for typing
| speed tests). In real life I can't formulate words anywhere
| close to that fast, so my WPM ends up probably being less 40 if
| I had to guess.
| omegalulw wrote:
| Yup, having to type unseen text makes a lot of difference.
|
| Here's what I personally use to test my keyboard setups:
| monkeytype.com.
|
| My best is ~95 WPM and 100% accuracy.
| omegalulw wrote:
| Saw the article later, they use monkey type too. I would love
| to see them in the 30s test.
| ummonk wrote:
| Tried that and got 109 WPM with 100% accuracy on my Macbook
| Pro (non-butterfly) keyboard. I usually score around the 80s
| with regular sentences and punctuation on other sites though,
| so subtract 30% from the WPM results on this side to estimate
| a regular WPM.
| half-kh-hacker wrote:
| I like typing :)
|
| Here's 163 wpm on a macbook keyboard:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ulK2VJdQpw
|
| Here's 175 wpm on a custom mechanical keyboard:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO-A8rVJDOM
| prirun wrote:
| No idea how they can type that fast with those long finger
| nails!
| half-kh-hacker wrote:
| I actually keep my nails pretty short (they're only about
| 1 or 2mm past the furthest-out part of my fingertip) for
| typing reasons!
|
| My speed gets a lot worse if I let them grow out, so I
| like to file them down regularly (instead of clipping
| them occasionally) to keep them at a length I'm used to.
| userbinator wrote:
| They increase stiffness. You hit the keys with the hard
| nail instead of the squishy flesh of your fingers, which
| reduces jitter and improves timing accuracy.
|
| (I'm a fast typer, but not as fast as that one, also with
| long-ish --- around 0.050" --- fingernails.)
| riidom wrote:
| It's weird, how it looks more effortless, the faster
| someone types. Well done!
| epolanski wrote:
| Exactly, I'm a touch typist and regularly train on various
| websites. The biggest blocker after you start reaching high
| speeds isn't even the keyboard but the brain. You need to read
| far far ahead to write at 130+ wpm you basically are typing a
| word while you read the following sentence. 200+ requires
| writing even more ahead.
|
| A normal person can barely "mentally process" that many words
| per second.
| westopheles wrote:
| A bit OT, but can you recommend/do you know of any touch
| typing training websites which include training for the
| numeric keypad, or even for the numbers/symbols row above the
| alphabetic symbols?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| QWERTY has a steep learning curve as well, it's just that it's
| so ubiquitous that most people don't question or remember the
| work that was put into.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _has a steep learning curve_
|
| just to make the pedantic point, learning curves show skill
| improvement plotted against time spent/experience, and
| therefore a steep learning curve means you learn quickly. A
| shallow learning curve is the difficult one. /pedantry
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Your own link explains that the phrase is a misnomer.
| You're not pedantic; you're just mistaken about others
| being wrong.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| A steep learning curve can also mean you make very little
| progress for a long time until suddenly being proficient.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| From your link:
|
| > An activity that it is easy to learn the basics of, but
| difficulty to gain proficiency in, may be described as
| having "a steep learning curve".
|
| That matches QWERTY exactly.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| A significant difference between a conventional keyboard and
| steno is that a conventional keyboard is capable of producing
| all the of the text we normally type, and a steno machine is
| not. A necessary part of stenotype is a combination of pre-
| work (dictionary development for e.g. proper names) and post-
| work (editing the steno transcript to produce a "real
| English" document instead of one that may only have the
| generally correct sounds). Modern steno software helps a lot
| by partially automating these steps but steno is still
| inherently not capable of producing correct spelling without
| manual assistance - the basic architecture of steno is that
| you type the phonemes and (in modern usage) software guesses
| the correct spelling based on a dictionary. Much of the speed
| advantage of steno comes from the basic fact that it is a
| "lossy" process in the information-theoretic sense, that is,
| the "text" that you enter does not contain spelling
| information, only pronunciation... and even pronunciation is
| sometimes a simplified or substitute form as the American
| steno machine can't represent all of the phonemes that see
| use in English (mostly due to borrow words).
|
| In the end, steno itself is probably not a lot harder to
| learn than QWERTY (although I think more frustrating because
| the "hunt and peck" option for steno is less intuitive and
| often slower). But it requires sort of a "supporting
| ecosystem" of skills and tools that is more complex and not
| amenable to use cases other than natural language. That makes
| it much less attractive for general use.
| voxl wrote:
| CharaCorder is not a stenograph, individual character entry
| is supported, just like a normal qwerty keyboard.
| xupybd wrote:
| Yeah but you are not going to get the speeds they boast
| about without steno.
| Xevi wrote:
| I'm not the one you responded to, but I just wanted to
| add that it's still not steno. CharaChorder just has
| chording, but no theories, or whatever you call them for
| steno. You basically have to memorize every single chord
| on the CharaChorder afaik.
| xupybd wrote:
| Ah thanks for clarifying.
|
| I had thought that chording to produce a words was enough
| to qualify as steno.
|
| Happy to be corrected :)
| imglorp wrote:
| Apples and oranges anyway. Steno is phonemes, computer
| keyboards are characters.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Typical steno keyboards can definitely type single
| characters. Of course the most _sensible_ use of them
| involves chords (defined according to a text-specific
| 'theory'), but you might still use them for _mostly_
| single-character entry if, e.g. you were concerned about
| RSI.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| I'm not sure the learning curve is all that steep. I learned
| it as part of a "keyboarding" class around... 1989 or
| something (I was in middle school). Learning to type was only
| a small portion of the class, and it happily included games
| and letter art alongside the learning.
|
| Best class I took because of touch typing.
|
| On the other hand, I have plenty of peers that type nearly as
| quickly using two fingers or simply by doing years of using a
| computer. People learn the layout with use. It is easy enough
| that switching from a standard American keyboard to a
| Norwegian keyboard (whose alphabet has 3 more letters in
| addition to some other European language letters and
| punctuation) was a non-issue.
| fossuser wrote:
| I'd argue it's a different kind of learning though.
|
| QWERTY is more 'what you see is what you get' - you push a
| key and you get that letter. Sure the layout is weird and
| learning to type takes some effort, but there's very little
| additional cognitive load. It's like a WYSIWYG editor.
|
| Steno is like Vim, you have to have all of the phrases in
| your head tracking a lookup table cognitively. Over time sure
| that becomes muscle memory and lowers the load but I think
| it's less gradual. You have to frontload a lot of the
| commands first. IME most people will never do that so it'll
| always remain niche.
| aksss wrote:
| > IME most people will never do that so it'll always remain
| niche.
|
| like vim.. _winces in anticipation of things thrown at him_
| aidos wrote:
| We're niche, but happy
| Jorengarenar wrote:
| Well said. We're niche, but big enough to be self
| sustainable. The best kind of niche
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| True, but QWERTY is labeled and obvious how to use. Hence the
| great number of woodpecking that occurs out there.
| jejones3141 wrote:
| That's why I got a Dvorak skin for my TypeMatrix keyboard.
| I know QWERTY well enough I don't have to look for it, and
| I can switch to Dvorak and be able to peek if need be.
| globuous wrote:
| Yeah, I switched to Dvorak a few years back, it was the worst
| experience in the world. Granted I had to fight against my
| qwerty reflexes
| snuxoll wrote:
| I was lucky to never have properly learned to touch type on
| QWERTY in the first place, I had key positions memorized
| but I always used my index fingers - it actually hindered
| me from touch typing as the bad habit would always creep
| back up. Thus I forced myself to learn from square one with
| Dvorak, not having the keycaps on my keyboard to fall back
| on - it was painful, but I'm glad I did it.
|
| Now 15 years later I really enjoy the flow of the layout, a
| majority of the time when typing you alternate between
| sides of the keyboard when typing and it just feels good.
| nthdeui wrote:
| When I learnt to touch type I switched to Dvorak at the
| same time. I liked the idea of improved efficiency but
| whenever I had to use someone else's computer or they
| needed to use mine it was too much hassle. Once I'd
| relearned to touch type with Qwerty life was so much
| easier. Also hjkl with Vim using Dvorak was just too hard
| to get my brain around
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > hjkl with Vim using Dvorak was just too hard to get my
| brain around
|
| Why not just remap? My intuition is that the cascading
| conflict wouldn't be that hard to resolve (at least
| compared to learning Dvorak...) but maybe I'm wrong.
| mynameisash wrote:
| J and K are adjacent in Dvorak, and they're down and up,
| respectively, which makes vertical scrolling just as
| easy, IMO. I never really used H and L but instead rely
| on mostly W and B (which aren't adjacent but are close
| enough). So by happy coincidence, navigating in vim works
| just fine, I think.
| clove wrote:
| You can easily and quickly add a Dvorak keyboard to
| someone else's computer, deleting it once done. I did
| that all the time when I worked as an editor, having to
| occasionally edit on clients' computers. The benefit of
| speed gained from using Dvorak outweighs the
| inconvenience of having to occasionally add and delete a
| keyboard on other computers.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Buy a mechanical keyboard with the ability to modify the
| firmware. I did this and it was worth the $200 price tag.
|
| Forgetting to configure computers after finishing with
| them, not knowing what layout was in use in the login
| screen, initial configuration, etc all cost time. I also
| use RDP a lot which is layout roulette (sometimes it
| changes, sometimes it doesn't)
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Mmmhm not sure I'd agree.
|
| Initial learning curve is practically non-existent - Anybody
| can type a letter "A" or a word or a sentence on a QWERTY by
| looking and poking. It is not my understanding that I could
| do ANYthing on a stenography device without significant,
| serious training.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I think the best argument for things other than QWERTY
| nowadays is ergonomics, not speed. RSI is no joke.
| fivea wrote:
| > QWERTY has a steep learning curve as well, it's just that
| it's so ubiquitous that most people don't question or
| remember the work that was put into.
|
| This assertion ignores crucial differences in the basic
| mechanics of typing in a standard QWERTY keyboard (i.e., look
| at the keyboard, press one key, get the desired character)
| and using a stenograph/chorded keyboard. A standard
| keyboard's discoverability makes it incomparably easier to
| ramp up than guessing which key combos get you a specific
| character combo/word.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| The learning curve for stenography is much higher. With a
| keyboard, the buttons do exactly what they say and that only.
| With a stenography machine, every possible combination of
| buttons does a different thing.
|
| When typing the word "Unprepared" on a keyboard, you just
| have to look at the buttons and find each of the ones with
| those labels, and hit them in sequence.
|
| To type the word "Unprepared" on a steno machine, you need to
| hit the buttons UPB all at once and then PRAOEPD all at once,
| knowing that PB is a combo that means N, that the UPB set
| assumes that it's a prefix to whatever follows, that AOE
| represents the vowel sound /i/, and that your software
| understands the input "preepd" to be a shorthand for
| 'prepared'.
|
| You can try it out with your regular keyboard in the browser
| here: http://www.openstenoproject.org/demo/
| megous wrote:
| Keyboards that use multiplexed row/column electrical matrix
| will not allow you to detect more than two keys in any box
| pattern simultaneously. So pressing more than two keys on
| that virtual steno keyboard is impossible on a regular
| keyboard (for many key combinations).
| missblit wrote:
| Every time I get a new laptop I have to adjust my muscle
| memory since their layouts vary so much :( still can't type
| the upper right letters consistently on my current laptop.
| FpUser wrote:
| To my shame I've never learned how to type. It does not
| really impede my coding abilities as it is fast enough to
| follow my thinking. But if I need to chat online my slowness
| drives me mad (I assume it does the same to the other party).
| fossuser wrote:
| It's worth learning and really doesn't take that much time
| to get to a decent wpm.
|
| It makes it way easier to communicate via text.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| It's worth practicing! I bet it's not too hard to get
| reasonably fast in a few weeks. The hardest part will be
| un-learning any bad habits, but if you reckon you're
| currently slow, you probably don't have too many.
| FpUser wrote:
| I've been typing with the same speed for the last 30
| years. It is not improving so I really doubt special
| exercise will do anything but marginal improvement.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You would be surprised by hovering your fingers over home
| row how naturally quickly you will start typing.
| Hesinde wrote:
| Don't practice typing faster with your current method,
| because you already have for 30 years. Rather invest some
| time to learn a better method.
|
| I learned touch typing within a week on holiday vacation
| with a software similar to this website:
| https://www.typingstudy.com/ (Young me felt very proud of
| being able to type like dad.) Once you have invested the
| time to learn the basic movements, you will become
| accustomed to them naturally.
| [deleted]
| vanous wrote:
| Take the time to learn, it is absolutely worth it. Do not
| pay attention to the comments saying "you will be at some
| speed soon" as that's not your aim. Learn to type precisely
| with as little errors. It will take you several months to
| just learn the keys. That's fine, it's like coding,
| learning the slow and hard way, you are in it for the long
| game. Good luck!
| [deleted]
| bee_rider wrote:
| I, and I think many other people, didn't really 'work' at
| learning to type. We just practiced as a side effect of using
| the computer rather than, say, taking typing lessons. For
| someone like me, QWERTY has a difficulty curve. I think seno
| technically wouldn't have a curve. The inability to hunt and
| peck means that without explicitly setting aside time to
| train in steno, there isn't any way to make real progress.
| Mathematically, a curve should not contain discontinuities!
| rightbyte wrote:
| I never learned to write on a keyboard in a controlled way
| and I still can't 'touch type' naturally.
|
| I tried to learn in, but I always fall back to my old
| habits since my right hand hurt otherwise. I don't think I
| will ever bother getting fast. It is probably way better to
| learn it properly from the beginning.
| NavinF wrote:
| A keyboard tray helps since you can't comfortably keep
| your eyes on a keyboard that's under the desk.
|
| Forcing myself to stop looking at the keys initially
| increased error rate to an unacceptable/demotivating
| level, but in a couple of weeks I was touch typing quite
| a bit faster than I could hunt and peck with no loss in
| accuracy.
| dntrkv wrote:
| A while back I decided to fix some of my bad keyboard
| habits. I forget the software I used, but it took me
| about 2 weeks of daily 15 minute practice to fix many of
| my bad habits and improve my typing skills in general.
| I've been thinking about doing it again because I still
| have some remaining bad habits, especially with the
| pinkies. Well worth the effort, at least for me.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I did about the same and I got alot better, but I think I
| need to practice a bit more to not fall back when I don't
| think about it.
| bee_rider wrote:
| For some reason whenever I try to touch type 'correctly'
| I make typos. But I do get most of my fingers in play
| when typing normally. I just have a weird stance -- left
| index on f, right middle on j, right pinky on p. Index
| and middle fingers do a little extra work, left pinky is
| mostly reserved for control keys -- esc, crtl...
|
| I dunno. I don't have anywhere near 60 words per minute
| that are actually worth recording.
| Hesinde wrote:
| I think the point of touch typing is not about being able
| to type a novel per month, but about spending less mental
| effort on typing. No matter whether you touch type
| "properly" or not, the ability to keep focusing on the
| screen eliminates micro context switches between thinking
| and typing.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I think you have a great point. It is not as much about
| speed but about freeing your mind while typing.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye since private computer chatting essentially died out I
| see no use for fast typing anymore. When I and all my
| friends communicated via computer text typing fast would
| have been really convenient.
|
| Ergonomic typing however, I guess is important. And I am
| bad at that. Looking down to find the keys might be a bad
| habit? I have almost trained that away.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| >since private computer chatting essentially died out
|
| News to me
| bee_rider wrote:
| Hmm. I wonder if I saved myself some embarrassment on
| Instant Messenger by not typing too fast to think.
|
| I don't really understand why properly trained typing is
| more ergonomic, anyway. If I keep my hands perfectly on
| the homerow, each letter is nearly the same exact motion.
| The way I type normally, my hands move around a bit, so
| there's a couple character history built into my motions.
| This seems to me like it ought to reduce the repetitive
| motions, which are what lead to repetitive strain
| injuries, right?
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye keeping the fingers at one row home position doing the
| same dance feels terribly unergonomic and crammed. I was
| only thinking about the neck looking down (dentists have
| problems with that).
|
| Maybe I stress my hands more while tryhard practicing
| touch typing than I would in normal use though.
| powera wrote:
| This feels like native advertising.
|
| But effective! I may buy one just in case it works.
| maxerickson wrote:
| 10 words in 2 seconds isn't really a very impressive way to do
| 500 words per minute.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| That thing isn't really a keyboard is it? It doesn't have keys
| and it isn't a board. It's more a joystick controller.
| xondono wrote:
| Those joysticks do have switches at the ends (that click)
| though...
|
| I don't know, it's a very philosophical question
| abeppu wrote:
| > Keen is experimenting with a modified version of the device
| that he thinks might even allow babies to type and communicate
| similarly to the way some babies communicate with sign language.
|
| I feel like this warrants its own article. Jumping from
| understanding but not being able to reliably speak words to
| chording without reading or letters in between sounds like a
| really interesting direction. Are the chords chosen to relate to
| orthography? To sound? To semantics? How would you teach it? A
| caregiver can easily demonstrate a sign. A chord is a lot less
| visually salient and harder to demonstrate.
| otrahuevada wrote:
| If there's one scenario where I'd dread autocomplete-
| based/chorded typing is when coding or writing on a terminal. My
| coding usually comes _after_ some consideration about I want to
| write, and having to tack an additional "let's proofread what the
| software thought was close enough" step on top of that would make
| it seriously annoying. I already have an expansion plugin on my
| editor that allows me to insert potentially massive amounts of
| boilerplate for me if I happen to need to, and I already trust
| it.
| westcort wrote:
| I ordered one. This could be a huge benefit for someone like me
| who writes for a living.
| 58x14 wrote:
| I'm fairly obsessed with alternative HIDs. I bought the Tap Strap
| 2 but never broke past the initial learning curve.
|
| I'm going to buy a CharaChorder now. I'm also a musician, so I'm
| really interested to see what types of functionality I could map,
| given the additional interface dimensions. However, I'll need to
| test the input lag, typically anything > 20ms is rather
| noticeable for live music; if they have esports as a target
| market, hopefully they've already accounted for that.
|
| I type ~80WPM with 90%+ accuracy, but I don't find that typing
| speed is my blocker, rather the speed of a coherent thought.
| Maybe typing at ludicrous speeds will channel some deep stream of
| consciousness?
| Shank wrote:
| > I type ~80WPM with 90%+ accuracy, but I don't find that
| typing speed is my blocker, rather the speed of a coherent
| thought. Maybe typing at ludicrous speeds will channel some
| deep stream of consciousness?
|
| I agree with this, at least to some extent. If I'm rote copying
| something from a text (e.g., from a typing test website), I can
| achieve 130-140wpm easily. If I'm creating original thought or
| trying to actually compose a reply to someone, I think much
| slower than I can type. It takes a lot more effort to compose
| logical sentences that make sense on paper than it does to type
| them, in my experience.
|
| What really makes me want to try these alternate input systems
| is the allure of being able to type while walking outside at
| speed, which is something I can't do on a smartphone.
| CharaChorder seems like it's nice on a desk, but the same could
| be said for a plain stenography keyboard/machine.
| 58x14 wrote:
| > type while walking outside at speed
|
| Yes, exactly this. I didn't expect the Tap Strap would be
| refined enough to serve this purpose (too much ambient
| motion) but I like to keep looking for something novel.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| > _If I 'm rote copying something from a text (e.g., from a
| typing test website), I can achieve 130-140wpm easily._
|
| Weird. I have the opposite problem. I'm usually in the ~80-90
| range typing something I'm reading. I find it way slower to
| read the text, the repeat it. But if I'm typing from my brain
| I'm way faster because I can skip the reading step.
| tombert wrote:
| Feel like when I am speaking somewhat conversationally (e.g. IM
| or even HN), I can think much faster than I can when doing
| something like Typeracer. It could be a result of me growing up
| with AIM and MSN Messenger, or maybe just a result of the fact
| that I tend to talk really fast regardless, but I almost can
| view typing as an extension of my brain, and as a result I do
| actually feel like my inability to type faster is a limiting
| factor.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Actually, I think that is completely normal. When writing
| with pen and paper, it's so slow that you can't help but
| think ahead. You're thinking in parallel because you have
| time before you write the next clause or sentence. You might
| scratch out a word or sentence or two, but overall your
| thoughts will probably be more coherent and well-considered.
|
| Even typing at 150 WPM (actually fast) is about the same
| speed as dictation. Anyone who's done extensive dictation
| knows how slow that actually is.
| 300bps wrote:
| _I type ~80WPM with 90%+ accuracy, but I don 't find that
| typing speed is my blocker, rather the speed of a coherent
| thought_
|
| I'm on typeracer.com with an average typing speed of 154 WPM
| with 99% accuracy. I don't find my thoughts to be limiting for
| typing purposes.
| tombert wrote:
| You're making me feel a little inadequate about my current
| record of 97WPM with 99% accuracy.
| vehemenz wrote:
| On the other hand, it's making me feel pretty good about my
| thinking speed. ;)
| bradlys wrote:
| I don't really know how people get past 120-130wpm with
| sustained accuracy. I find that I trail off around
| 100-110wpm. It really depends on the text too. Some text with
| a lot of difficult double repeated letters, fancy
| punctuation, etc. in a row or hard to read words - not so
| great.
|
| I just did the practice twice. Once at 100wpm (keyboard
| twister kind of text). Once at 130wpm (easy sentences). So
| much variation just from the practice text alone. This is
| also on a macbook pro keyboard literally on my lap - which I
| fucking hate and find horrible to type on and mess up on all
| the time. (I think it is also dysfunctional/semi-broken)
|
| I don't think I could ever hit 150wpm. I just don't see how
| it's possible with a normal keyboard - at least for me. Never
| seen anyone do it sustained either. Must be some <1% skill -
| as I'm the fastest typer of just about anyone I've met and I
| don't feel fast.
|
| Speed of thought is mostly the issue for me too though even
| at 130wpm. If I am saying things faster than that - whatever
| I am saying is probably not worth reading outside of a chat
| conversation.
| userbinator wrote:
| _I don 't really know how people get past 120-130wpm with
| sustained accuracy._
|
| Speaking as someone who can type in the 130-140 range and
| has gone over 200 in short bursts --- the keyboard makes a
| _huge_ difference. Look for one with a low actuation force,
| short distance-to-actuation, and a "bouncy" feeling that
| helps your fingers return. I'm using a cheap no-name
| rubber-dome keyboard, but it's definitely on the softer
| side compared to most others I've used.
|
| Unfortunately, the only searches on Google for its model
| number (KM-2601P) are the posts here where I've mentioned
| it on other keyboarding articles:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24761580 (Don't you
| find it disturbing that a keyboard which was probably
| manufactured in the millions of units has literally _only
| one person on the whole Internet_ mentioning it!?)
|
| I also have a mechanical keyboard with clicky Blue Alps
| switches, which is impressively loud and satisfying to type
| on, but reaching 120 on that one is far more difficult; and
| I've also typed on a Thinkpad (pre-island style) keyboard,
| which has been praised as one of the best laptop keyboards,
| but maintaining even 100 on that one is very tiring --- it
| has far too much actuation pressure.
| 300bps wrote:
| My ex-wife used to say that she could not randomly mash the
| keys on a keyboard as fast as I can accurately type. I've
| had people ask me if I'm human based on the speed of my
| typing. But honestly if you watch YouTube videos of typing
| competitions - there are lots of people that are 160+.
|
| I first learned to type in 1982 and that really accelerated
| when I got online in 1985. I did not touch type at that
| point - I just used 3 fingers on each hand. The first year
| I learned to touch type my typing instructor typed 60 WPM
| and I typed 75. Then it just went up from there after 4
| years of formal typing instruction.
|
| For what it's worth, I use a Das Keyboard mechanical
| keyboard.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > I don't find that typing speed is my blocker, rather the
| speed of a coherent thought.
|
| In _my_ case (which probably shares at least a few similarities
| to yours), I (a) have some tasks where I really do need to type
| fast (usually either when I 'm transcribing my voice notes to
| text, or when I've already formed an idea into a sentence in my
| head and just need to get it out) and (b) have highly irregular
| rates of thought, where sometimes I'll have things I want to
| write at 300 WPM, and other times I don't have any ideas for
| minutes on end.
|
| In the former case, faster is always better. In the latter
| case, while you might not be directly blocked on typing speed,
| it _does_ allow you to get the typing out of the way faster, so
| that you can then move on to more thinking, or another non-
| typing action.
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