Retraining my terrible typing habits
As a software engineer who barely types code anymore (thanks AI), I have still been typing to make sure this muscle doesn’t atrophy prematurely (as well as to stay fresh for potential interviews). I’ve never been a super fast typer but one thing I noticed recently is that I really struggle in accuracy when I’m typing certain keys—in particular the top right of the keyboard. I’ve noticed a few key insights as I have spent probably more time than normal this last week or two thinking about this and have since started a new training program that targets that area specifically.
Old Basketball injury
For the record, I don’t play basketball and I never really did. But as a college student I would go play with my friend 1 on 1 for some exercise and we got pretty into it. One day I jammed my right pinky pretty bad. It took weeks to heal. Basically anytime of day now I can crack it. It’s always a little stiff/tight.
My theory for years of typing laziness, speed reduction, and lacking accuracy points back to this finger injury. I have been compensating virtually anytime I type because of this stiffness and how uncomfortable it is to stretch my pinky properly to reach the keys.
The (over) compensation
Instead of using my pinky for many of the keys in the top right of the keyboard what I actually do is a hybrid of pinky or ring finger. One of the biggest culprits is the delete button. I just go full force for it with my ring finger instead of my pinky (ironically as I’m typing this I’m consciously trying to force myself to use correct form and I’m failing miserably). I’ve noticed that this causes some inconsistencies and “cache-misses” when I try to hit the keys and recenter my self on home row. Because I’m moving my hand and rotating much more than I usually would, I now have to adjust back and I lose some speed and accuracy as a result. If I could keep my hands in the home row I think I would see an accuracy increase as well as a speed increase. This all was only made worse by a career change that involved a lot more typing.
Changing careers to programming
A number of years ago I changed my career to slinging code. Before this I didn’t type +=-_()[{]}|\\ and delete nearly as much. I just typed normal words. A large part of my job was playing guitar and I don’t use my right pinky nearly as much when I play guitar. But now I type a lot of symbols and quasi-words combined with symbols. I’ve noticed that my typing accuracy is not as good as I would hope/expect and it annoys me as type and then press backspace a lot to fix it often with multiple re-attempts. I often delete entire words with opt+delete on Mac to speed things up instead of just fixing a few letters back. Apparently it’s faster in my injury-compensated typing flow to just delete the entire word and type it all again correctly… I’m not really sure if this is the case but it would be interesting to get some real analytics.
Search for alternatives
During this time I also realized that it’s weird having my pinky do all this heavy lifting of typing the programming symbols and as a result I’m also considering alternative keyboards that might better utilize other fingers that are stronger/faster or even different layouts in general that might help. Though I am nervous to attempt changing my keyboard layout. Let me know if you have any suggestions here.
The training program
This is definitely an over exaggerated heading name but I found this free typing website that lets you add your own text and I randomly creating my own typing test that specifically targets this right pinky/upper row of the keyboard that I’m wasting a lot of time with. Here’s the random website I found https://www.typingtom.com/ and a link to the custom 2min timer section I use: https://www.typingtom.com/custom/typing-test/2m (I’m not affiliated with them and this is not a recommendation). Here’s the text I feed it manually to start my morning practice:
90-= 90-= 90-= ()-= ()-= ()-= (9)0 -_=+ 9=0- 9=0- 9=0- =9-0 =9-0 90-= 90-= 90-= ()-= ()-= ()-= (9)0
Basically I just paste this into it and start a 2 minute timer. I have yet to complete it in 2 minutes. I started at 9 wpm and just this morning have hit 24 wpm. This is after about a week of practicing for maybe 5 minutes per morning. I’d say that’s not too shabby. If you’re a software engineer (or not) I’m curious how fast you can type these as well on your first go and what keyboard you’re using. Comment if you’re interested!
Looking ahead
I think a followup I’d like to work on would be doing a proper typing test that highlights all of my top 5-10 trouble spots and systematically focusing on these. It would be nice to fix some of my other typing blunders of which I know there are many. For example when I’m typing a normal message in slack I still do a lot of this delete and retype back and forth.
While I’m pretty sure I have some other bad habits, from what I can tell this is the area with the largest to gain from some targeted re-training. If you have any recommendations or have had a similar experience please share!
-Jesse