Hacker News Reader

Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

This, like almost every typing training system out there, suffers from my pet peeve: if you type an extra character or miss a character, then you end up with a series of “mistakes” instead of just one.

Why don’t these programs use some form of edit distance? I’m sure that one could come up with a way to freeze the edit beyond some distance from the caret to reduce the potential for spooky UI action at a distance.

View on HN

> This, like almost every typing training system out there, suffers from my pet peeve

Did you know about

https://zty.pe/

It's a pretty old one at this point, but fantastic implementation

That’s brilliant, thanks, I didn’t know that before

i may actually learn to touch type with this 0_o

I really liked typing of the dead. I feel like many years ago I found an online version you can play in a browser but now I have trouble finding it.

I was trained to type two spaces after a period: it's in my muscle memory. This website treats it as a mistake. No typing teacher would downgrade for that. It's awful.

Two spaces after a period is correct?

It was on typewriters because the fonts were monospace so the period would have some extra space to its left, the double space after it made it easier to see at a glance where a new sentence occurs.

That's how I was taught in typing class in the mid 90s.

Sir, this is a mistake. You've been trained by mistake to produce mistakes. We know it's awful.

No it is not a mistake. It is not fashionable in digital media thanks I believe to twitters character limits.

Look at any printed media from the last 100 years. Printing presses, books, magazines, newspaper.

A double space offers a visual clue where a 'mental breath' takes place.

It's true that the space between sentences should be larger than the space between words, as it is in properly typeset text, though not twice as large. Using two spaces is a way to approximate that when you only have monospaced fonts. It's no longer encouraged in electronic text when using proportional fonts because the rendering software _should_ adjust the spacing itself.

edit: monospaced, not proportional.

It "should" adjust, but in practice most software do not render spaces after periods properly. There is no in band signal to distinguish periods for sentence ends vs e.g. Mr. Thus there is a clear argument for double spacing in all contexts

> Look at any printed media from the last 100 years.

I have, and it contradicts your point. The single space is the nearly universal standard in modern print media.

Sir, there are rules. You have to follow them. You don't insert arbitrary number of spaces after any punctuation marks. Your 'mental breath'/health issues should not affect others. Historical workarounds for quite technical problems from past eras don't mean what you think they mean. They were workarounds, not a valid reason to use double spacing in digital texts.

I don't really get this. This is how it should work, no? The point is to type the word correctly; if you miss a letter or mistype, and keep typing, then yeah, it's several mistakes in a row?

Letters in a row maybe. But one mistyped word shouldn’t cause subsequent words to appear mistyped

That doesn't seem to happen on typ.ing or really any other typing site I know of.

No, the point is to type the word a you'd do in real life, that is, make the mistake, finish word/sentence/thought and then correct. And the correction would be changing just the first mistake

> the point is to type the word a you'd do in real life,

I don't really know about that. I think the point is to practice typing, and that may or may not reflect how you type in everyday life. For example, most people don't spend their time typing random words without numbers or punctuation :)

In any case, are you saying that if you correct a word during one of these tests, it simply should not count as a mistake? Because if not, then I don't see what the problem is again - typ.ing and most other sites note corrections, and distinguish between corrected and uncorrected mistakes.

If so, I guess we might just disagree on what the point of these exercises is.

I don't see how this can be so difficult to understand. If the second word in my first sentence were misspelled, does that make every other word or letter that comes after wrong?

Nope. But I don't see that happening anywhere either, so I guess that explains the confusion.

If you type "elcome to typ.ing" it is all "red/error". It does not stop after "Welcome" even though everything after is correct.

See: https :// ibb.co / CKyxJNKR

I think what makes that so annoying is having to backtrack which is super jarring.

One idea is letting you press enter to jump to the start of the next word and immediately resume.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com