Show HN: I made a game to improve my typing speed
keysmash.no
keysmash.no
Some years later in school I also had a typing class at some point and the teachers thought I cheated because of my high scores so I had to take the test again with multiple teachers hovering over my shoulder – I scored slightly higher then.
I'm usually around 120wpm, which I know is not even a great score amongst typist but it's more than enough for me. I couldn't play the game due to an injury right now unfortunately, but I did click through it and agree with others that I prefer practising words or sentences - plus the letters appearing on different spots on the screen is annoying to me because that's not how I type, so I'm not sure if this is really great for typing practice (for me, at least) – but it could be good at becoming faster at blind typing maybe?
It's all fun and games until it's code. I barely clear 50 wpm on that, and I know where every key is without looking. I actually dread typing those 3-10 lines on that test, which is how I know I could use more practice, but can't find the time for it.
The biggest thing that got me here is that it doesn't match my coding style and especially whitespace at line endings were annoying. Also I'm on the couch on my laptop, not behind proper desk.
edit: after taking the first attempt and then writing this post, I went back to try it again. It said 6 wpm. Tried it again, and it said 5 wpm. That's clearly BS. I thought the first one was an accidental key press that started the timer while I made my comment here. But after restarting it to get an even slower ridiculously wrong time just really makes me mad I wasted my time.
>You can type 74 words per minute
(After a few attempts)
I self learned to type using "Iankey"[0] (the manual[1]). In my opinion, it is one of the best training tools I tried - I should search around my old backups to see if I can still find it.
[0] https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/68105/Iankey/ [1] https://www.habisoft.com/pcwwiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=apl...
Somebody also uploaded it to archive.org: https://archive.org/details/IanKey-Crash-Course-on-Typing-v3...
2) Thank god for autocompletion and other things IDEs do to save you from typing so much
3) It's weird and unnatural that the test requires so much whitespace.
4) This reaffirms my decision to get myself a keyboard kit like the Elora or Lily58. Main benefits being the otholinear layout and moving the mod keys and others like ([{}]) to the thumbs or other more ergonomic positions.
same for me as well. I was originally only going to take a single semester, but wound up taking the second semester as well. The first semester was all "A space S space D space F space" and gaining the muscle memory on how to type. Probably one of the single most useful courses in school for my everyday use. The second semester was much more focused on being an executive assistant with emphasis on how to properly format documents and that kind of thing. Easy-A GPA padding course, but I didn't complain too much since it was one of those classes where I was the only male in the class. They started us off on the older clackity-clack style arms, but if you became fast enough to out type the machine, you could progress to a speedball.
One thing I've been looking for (and would pay money for) is a tool/game that helps me improve my typing speed in real-world scenarios, especially writing code and/or editing documents.
I purchased a subscription to keybr,[0] and it's pretty nice, but it assumes you're always typing brand new text linearly. There's no way to practice things like jumping to a previous line, jumping to the beginning of a line, deleting a word.
I recently switched to a Kinesis Advantage keyboard (my first mechanical keyboard), and I was able to build muscle memory for the standard letter and number keys in a few days, but I'm still trying to get comfortable with control keys, arrow keys, and Home/End/Del in real-world flows.
Once you get used to it, an ergonomic keyboard helps a lot to speed up typing as well.
https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/246580/
More recently though, there's https://monkeytype.com/ and https://play.typeracer.com/ which are fun little breaks during the day.
I love the ZSA's tool for learning to type on their keyboards [0] - you might take inspiration from that. I love that they have both prose and programming modes, since you might want to improve your typing speed of non-alphanumerical characters as well.
P.S. Looks like it's also a working memory trainer, since you have to remember which letter chain appeared on the screen first. Still kind of cool.
Maybe it also needs to be clearer that the key closest to the bottom of the screen must be typed first, that wasn't obvious to me immediately.
I think it's good to try random letter games like this occasionally as well as regular typing tests.
2. Reminds me a bit of Typing of The Dead: Overkill[0].
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/246580/The_Typing_of_The_...
(It's been a couple years since I've played it, hence the vagueness.)
IIRC there's a bit of a difficulty spike when you have to transition from typing English to typing Latin...