Fyi, typing games are weirdly making a comeback on steam and I’m here for it
I played Typing of the Dead a month ago after not playing it since I was a kid. Holds up. I love typing games.
The best typing training I ever got was IRC. You had to learn to type fast or some idiot wouldn’t know how wrong he was.
This definitely prepared me for a career where 90% of my interaction with coworkers is via chat.
it took me quite some time to learn not to automatically append “:D” at the end of messages in business chat
Lol
IRC and Diablo 2 for me. You had to type fucking quick if you wanted to say something while your character was running to the spot you clicked on because you couldn’t click again until you finished and hit enter on that message lol.
Arguing with strangers on the internet taught me more than any teacher ever could.
Nuh uh! :p
JK, me too. XD
I took typing lessons back in the mid ‘90’s, which was VERY uncommon for teens to do. When we got the first online multiplayer games, they only had text chat. I certainly had the fastest, foulest mouth in chat 😂
I had a high school class in the mid-90s that taught you how to type. It was taught on typewriters.
There we go!
I spent more time socializing on World of Warcraft than actually leveling. Had lots of friends, and since been happily married to my best one!
Touch typing skills were essential, especially mid-combat.
…Or being the undiagnosed ADHD socialite I was, keeping like 8 running whisper and guild chats going in the game’s single chat window at once… 😂
While I can also say IRC, wasn’t anything like proving someone wrong, just keeping up with the speed of the conversation required being able to type without looking at the keyboard.
Yeah, I feel like Discord (ugh) got that way quick, too, in more populated rooms. IIRC, IRC didn’t have that “quote for context” either, so if you were hunt-and-pecking the conversation already moved on lol.
Yeah, for me it was all AIM chats, though I had a couple friends who used IRC. But if you wanted to be part of the conversation, you better know how to type. You wanna make a quip? Better be quick, because so does everyone else.
RuneScape
My parents had me partake in a touch typing course. Only a few years later, after becoming a wbb2 forum mod, did I truly begin to appreciate and practice that skill.
Also a great way to learn Dvorak. Memorize the key combo to switch between the two depending on how detailed you need to be in telling them they are wrong, but as long as you keep making yourself spend a little more time on the less familiar layout, you’ll eventually become fluent and won’t have to contort your fingers as much regularly to type quickly.
Though typing games can help, too.
I just jumped in after a few weeks of typing practice using one of those learn Dvorak sites
I should start out playing Zork with a Dvorak layout.
Zvorak or something
I was too late for IRC, but i was just in time for chat websites. Never was interested in 10-finger-typing, until i discovered online chats. After that, i was one of the fastest in my class.
Playing MUDs felt like an advanced typing course to me. Especially before scripts and shit became available in the front end. Running around, going through attacks, spells, changing stances, running back to town, roleplaying with other players, reading description text and needing to figure out if a had to go through or climb something and it would get real fun if someone was fighting a mob in the room you entered. Raids and stuff were just insane. Trying to keep up with everything and typing constantly without using the mouse for anything. I haven’t thought about playing those games for a long time, thanks for the walk down memory lane!
A lot of schools don’t because there isn’t a standardized program for teaching it. I know we used a very tough typing game for when we were taught. Not sure if I was slower on the uptake but I worked real hard to get good at touch typing.
Just showing off, excuse me
Well, username checks out.
Genuinely made me laugh
Homeboy mixed up his username and his password.
I hope autofill did that. That’s for sure a rando password right?
This guy types so much, friction completely erased the prints
it wasn’t there in the first place :p
get in touch with their support if you haven’t already
I think you misunderstand, i payed 10€ to not have the prints, because not only it’s wrong when the layout changes (i do this a lot) but it is also way cooler looking
It’s actually good to have the wrong layout printed. You’ll get multiple times the confusion, especially with non-touch-typists, who’ll just assume they hit all the wrong keys, and will try again and again.
How is that good exactly?
Hard mode on, I see.
aaaaaalright
I had key caps like that in grad school both in my home and school computers. Made it real awkward when friends would come over and try to use my computer for something (e.g. look up some songs to put on a Spotify playlist).
well i have no friends, so am safe
My main keyboard was a blank das keyboard for a while, and I had a Fisher price learning keyboard that I’d pull out for my friends if my keyboard intimidated them.
I had a more sedate keyboard for those I didn’t know well enough.
That is very funny trolling and exactly how one should treat their friends
🥵
Now make it dvorak
Now make it programmer-dvorak
I can handle most typing by touch but there’s no way I’m going to remember the ampersand, carrot, and percentage keys.
Start using vim and you’ll learn real quick
Oh, you’d learn if you tried. Sounds way harder than it is.
I’d learn if I practiced.
The problem is that I’m not using those keys very often, so it doesn’t stick in my mind.
And there’s no way I’m going to practice either. There’s basically no point for me.
framework spotted! (13 pro? wink wink)
I see another fella 😉
If only, I have a 10 year old Macbook Air lmao
I thought the pro only came in the black/graphite
Those keys still have the lines on them
You still need the lines. The lines are there to identify where to put your fingers, not to tell you what key you’re on.
Your confidence is intimidating
I’m with yaHehe solid choice 😎 have a nice day/evening
Wish they offered ortho too.
No one makes this for iOS that I can tell
Blank phone keyboards heh :)
As Mavis Beacon gently weeps…
I only learned a few years ago, she was not a real person. Just an actress that was used to create a persona. It did help me type tho.
If the dishonesty bothers you, I recommend a more realistic tutor for learning to type: Typing of the Dead.
Turning in her fictional grave.
Carriage returns from the grave.
They didn’t teach typing when I was in school. I guess it’s an assumed skill? Anywho, I still knew what those notches/bumps were for :3
Out of curiosity, about when were you in grade school? I learned touch typing in the late 90s in middle school. I remember laminated construction paper taped to each keyboard so we could learn visually first, then had to flip it over and cover our hands to start developing the muscle memory for each set of keys.
Not who you asked but I was in highschool in the 2010s and they had a typing class but it was an elective.
We didn’t start IT until 5th grade, which would’ve been in 2012-2013 :3
80s kid here, we learned on typewriters and the shared apple ii in the library. I was good at it because I knew piano and it just settled easy in my mind.
I made it mandatory for my kids to learn because I just knew this shit would be needed. Also didn’t allow for short words like LOL until they could type it out. Daughter got to a point where her “laugh out loud” was amazingly fast and she begged me to let her “be normal” lmfao.
Well… Ill explain for somebody who doesnt know:
Those are four your index finger. For the left and right hand.
So you can always have a base point for your typing without looking
Those are four your index finger.
But I only have two index fingers. Is that why I’m not good at typing?
I mostly type with my index and middle fingers only and type 144+ wpm lol… My wife’s always like “wth”
I’ve met a few people like that. Often they don’t go to the gym or do any form of exercise so this is how they choose to exert around 5,000 to 7,000N/cm2 for each of those keystrokes.
With not a millimetre of irony in their face they then tell you they need this brand of mechanical keyboard because the “cheaper ones all break”.
I had to break the nerd cycle that don’t touch grass, I gym 2 hours a day every day after work. And, don’t you know? The loudest keyboard in the office is the most dominate!! 😂
It’s not just typing speed. It’s also comfort and strain on your wrists and hand muscles.
Good typing position significantly reduces the risks of carpal tunnel syndrome, among other things.
I strongly disagree. I firmly believe that the “proper form” you and I were taught is why carpal tunnel is so common(I don’t think it one size fits all) People should do what’s comfortable for them. In fact, I’m pushing mid-30 and when I use proper form I get uncomfortable pain, and if I get a chair that doesn’t line up the armrest with my desk perfectly I also get uncomfortable pain. It’s possible that growing up with computers like I did I found what just worked for me, but I’ve never found the proper form comfortable. I’ve had computer classes up into my adult life.
With a good chair (my Herman) and wrist rest (a wood block) I’ve had 0 pain and work at my computer 8+ hours a day. I never leave my desk with any strain.
Hell almost every engineer I know doesn’t type properly. For me, the real problem is I always tuck a foot under me and sit on it. 😂
Cool.
Yessir the right way to learn to type was to out spam the spammers in world chat on WoW and trade 1 world on RS in 2005.
whoosh
I’ll fuckin bite because everyone else missed it.
How are these suppose to help when I have 144+ index fingers??? There’s not enough keys, let alone keys with whatever those little lines are
Ooooh. Thanks for the explanation!
cant you tell where your fingers are by just looking at what keys appear on your screen?
Back in the typewriter era it will cost you whiteouts every time you do this.
would looking down to see the key cost too much time?
Well nothing is stopping you from looking down. But this is a neat feature for those who knows to use it.
As a blind computer user I’m shocked at how many people forget touch typing exists. I learned earlier than most, by necessity, and didn’t have to take the then-mandatory keyboarding classes in middle school.
you’re blind ? using lemmy ? dude please talk more , how ? heck how did you even see the image ?!
Blind doesn’t mean they can’t see anything. Just that they have impaired vision.
My mother used to work for the Minnesota State Services for the Blind, so I grew up around a bunch of blind people. Most of them could partially see. They were considered “legally blind.” But they still needed tools to help them “see” better.
That’s what my mother’s job did; they provided access to equipment to assist blind people in their day-to-day lives. Converting books into braille or audio recordings, supplying walking canes, tape decks, and access to other resources to help them out.
They also gave out radios tuned to their own station, and they had a broadcasting studio in the office where employees or volunteers would just read newspapers or magazines for blind people to listen to over the radio.
Granted, my memory of all this was back before the Internet was a thing. I’m sure there are more advanced tools for this modern day and age that help with computer access.
Why call them blind then? The definition of blind says 1/10 or less of normal vision. There’s no way you can read text on a phone or computer with that.
I always assumed blind people just used TTS and voice reading.
Blindness comes in many different forms. It’s not about your vision being blurred or completely dark. Some blind people can only see clearly through tiny slits or pinholes in their vision.
Imagine a sheet of paper that you poke maybe 2 or 3 small holes in, then hold up a few inches from your face. Those holes are all you can see through in your field of vision; the rest is obscured.
And then there are people who need bottle-lensed glasses just to be able to barely read large 100-pt text in front of their face. They’re considered blind, even though they have some vision.
My mother had a Polish friend from her work who was like this. He had insanely thick glasses and walked mostly without a cane in familiar areas, but would have to touch your face to gauge your reaction while talking with you. Or practically press his face up against yours to look you in the eye. He had a laptop that would scan documents and display them in massive font so he could read them on the go.
Also, one of my best friends in high school woke up blind one day. His corneas detached from his eyeballs; a genetic defect from his family. He didn’t wake up in a dark room, he could still see shapes and colors. But he couldn’t focus on any of them.
I was tasked with walking him to each of his classes in school, because I had experience leading the blind. His greatest annoyance was when people waved their hand in front of his face and asked if he could see it. When he flinched (because a large blurry object came at his head), they accused him of faking blindness because he saw them. But he couldn’t make out what was coming at him, he was just reacting to sudden movements near his face.
My friend eventually got corneal transplants, which restored most of his vision. But he can never drive a car because his vision isn’t good enough to read road signs, even with corrective lenses. He’s considered legally blind.
When you need to split hairs, blind folks will call themselves “legally blind” if they have some limited sight, or “totally/completely blind” if they have no vision whatsoever. But if your optometrist claims you qualify for legally blind, you’re generally considered blind amongst their community and qualify for any associated disability benefits that come with blindness.
I see, makes sense. Thank you for the explanation.
I worked with a guy doing tech support that was blind. It was fascinating. He couldn’t of course see images. He would often ask me what was on the screen so he could help the caller. He used a Braille keyboard. It was awesome. Basically scroll line by line and the keyboard pops up the line enabling him to read it.
That’s super awesome. Your employer was doing a good thing enabling that
Yeah he was a really crazy interesting guy. At one point in time I actually let him drive my car in the parking lot because he said he had never driven a car before and he was always curious about it. Scariest 10 minutes of my life but it was an awesome blast to do that. He actually did pretty good at taking direction except for when we hit a curb because I told him to turn two sharp going around some of the berms.
Being blind is a spectrum, but even ‘fully’ blind people can use phones and computers with a screen reader.
Alt-text allows people to describe images, OCR can recognise text in images, and now AI can also describe images.
Blind people aren’t helpless, incapable or dependent, like some stereotypes might lead you to believe. Many are able to live relatively normal, independent lives.
Some even play videogames and stream on twitch.But some find constantly being asked the same questions and needing to inform others that they aren’t incapable to be quite annoying. Especially when this sort of info is readily available online.
I looked it up , didn’t find that much I didn’t call him incapable , I didn’t put any thing negative towards him , I was just curious !
I never said you did, and it’s perfectly normal to be curious.
It’s just that blind people have to answer these same uninformed questions all the time, and it can be tiring.Saying you did look it up seems worse to me than saying you didn’t.
One acknowledges a lack of effort, the other implies notable effort and failure at a relatively simple task.
No judgement intended, I’m just trying to instill some introspection. I’ll leave you be now.
Screen readers have gotten pretty good. They can use OCR to read text on an image if it’s not too jpeg’d and there’s even some that can describe the image a bit.
Many communities also have rules that you have to add captions to your images.
Touch typing means a whole different thing now lol
To make it really easy to know where U and H are, because you never want to be unable to type uhhhhh without looking at the keyboard
This comment has been brought to you by Dvorak, it would be great if it were more supported
Why would we need dvorak?
I found it to resolve the problem of my wrists hurting when I type too much.
But the lack of support is basically that for some reason games tend to use it as my keyboard layout (it’s my default) even when I switch to qwerty before starting it up, forcing me to respec the controls. Still worth not being in pain after typing up something, and definitely lower priority than left handed controls, but it is a minor annoyance.
Is anybody gonna tell this oblivious 30 year old who’s not particularly bad at typing what the lines are for?
So you can place your index fingers on the correct key without looking at the keyboard.
Huh, the more you know. Cheers!
I don’t see how one wouldn’t naturally get that, no offense. I mean, if one didn’t paticularly really ever use a keyboard and typed like gen-x or olders, with index fingers, sure.
But surely if you’re 30 and used a keyboard all your life you don’t need to look at the keyboard while typing…?
No offense. I may just be way overusing one since I was a teenager idk.
I’ve seen an incredible number of people who were never taught to properly touchtype and where each finger goes and developed bizarre techniques to type with 4, 6, or 8 fingers that may be almost as fast as the proper one but horrendously non-ergonomic. Ubiquity of staggered layouts (instead of proper ortholinear) does not help — it’s almost like it’s begging to type Z with ring finger and X with middle one.
I’m deep into my 40s, and I’m one of those. I can get up to 70 words per minute for short stretches, but it’s still a weird dance that combines muscle memory and hand-eye coordination.
I did learn just enough to know to hover my hands and keep my arms at a good posture, so I’ve never had any RSI from typing. That also may be partly because that I’m so inconsistent that I don’t get enough of the R for RSI, LOL.
I touch type , and yes I figured out what the lines were for… But I definitely don’t use them as reference points when I’m typing.
Doesn’t really have to do whether youre good or bad. When they teach you officially, they show you that the j and f are the home row where your index fingers go. If you’re self taught you might not know that and that’s totally fine as long as you can still type.
I’m self-taught as well, and someone knowing the “proper” way to type could probably have a stroke looking at my hands on the keyboard lmao. But yeah since I don’t need to look at the keys when I’m typing, and I still type pretty fast and without mistakes, who cares? If it works it works, even if it looks insane
Wow, they really don’t teach you kids typing anymore, huh.
Born in time to ask shitty questions on Twitter.
Born too late to JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT.
UST UCKING GOOGLE IT
FTFY
Not to get too technical, but you meant
TY
You’re welcome!
I would guess some people like learning being a social experience
This. Some people seem to take the desire to learn from a person as a personal attack, too.
I grew up with a computer in the 80s and for years i would stare at the keyboard while mentally keeping track of what I was typing.
I took keyboarding in middle school and learned to touch type but it took years of practice to break the habits I formed as a child.
Now I’ll be typing something and my husband will walk in so I’ll pause and look over to see what he needs. One time he said “don’t stop on my account” so I started typing again while staring at him.
I can hold a full conversation while doing this but have to slow down to around 60wpm to avoid transcribing the conversation.
They don’t teach typing anymore. Which is like. Makes zero sense.
I see college kids typing out essays with two index fingers.
No one learns typing unless forced. It’s super boring.
They need to make it mandatory in public schools. Or future generations will be unable to type properly.
I learned it back in like 8th grade or something.
When I was a kid they taught us how to type in school. But they taught everybody how to type wrong: with your hands parallel to each other, instead of wrists straight. I nearly got carpal tunnel syndrome and had to learn how to type a second time!
We were taught the same. With a paper over our hands so we couldn’t cheat. My hands naturally moved off home row because it felt awkward to have my wrists bent. I hate the “natural” keyboards but my hands rest like they’re designed
I learned to keep my hands like that thanks to a really weird looking A4Tech ergonomic keyboard, then I realized I could just keep my wrists like that on any keyboard.
I used to have one of those ergonomic keyboards at my last job. Took a week probably to get fully used to (I typed all day). But I recall liking it.
I have small hands but even I feel like most keyboards are cramped. Especially laptop ones.
the egonomic one felt more open and relaxed. But it was wonky to use at first.
Was something like this one.
Split keyboards for the win! Mine and my wife’s Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 is the epitome of “perfect keyboard”. We both dread the day they die since they’re no longer available.
8th grade? I had typing lessons in 4th!
Really depends on your age. I self-taught with my mom’s typewriter when I was like 8 or 9 and then wasn’t officially taught until 8th grade when computers became more commonplace in schools. Then I had to relearn when I went to school for transcription in my 20s because apparently my 8th grade teacher did a bad job.
Love typing though, my first video game was a typing game on a floppy disk on our windows 97.
That’s actually so cool. I’m just a bit too young to have done so, but I would have loved to have learned on a typewriter. I’ve only ever touched one as a fun relic of the past, never for actual use.
30 Years ago
F J F J F J … G H G H G H …
all lads had a sad lass
Look, I hadn’t learned what to do with girls yet ok? I got better.
They don’t teach much of anything anymore. Schools are babysitters that give grades.
“just ask AI”
tbf i loved computers when they first became common cuz i could do tutorials on them and tutorials arent emotional and grow impatient and say it doesnt have time for all my questions.
which just goes to show just how there is lots of bad teachers out there.
so i get it. especially for neuro divergent peeps who are legitimately curious and are trying but scared to take up anyone’s time, i really get it. Personally i think its good OP brings a question and people who do have time do answer.
this is the way.
I read something yesterday about influencers posting about history and inserting themselves in historical locations/events using ai.
They place themselves in-between survivors on a boat, while the Titanic sinks, for example. Making themselves look as miserable as the others.
Their motivation is that they think that teaching using textbooks is incompatible with many students and just plain boring.
Not just influencers. EdTech, including Khan Academy, is pushing AI to make virtual versions of historical figures to engage students.
Hi Lisa! I’m Gehngis Khan. You’ll go where I go! Defile what I defile! Eat who I eat!
I mean history shows always have done reenactments. It’s just the current iteration of that.
