Ten finger typing

Getting Started

Almost all computer users already know to type. Most start by a hide-and-seek keyboard game with two fingers and gradually use more fingers to get faster. Many stay with that, loosing time they could save by typing the right way. To learn typing with ten fingers will take you something between two days and two weeks, and the best thing is: you don’t have to torment yourself by typing sentences that only consist of ASDF and JKL or something equally annoying.
Just place the fingers in the home position, and start typing anything. (Write an email, do your annual tax declaration, etc.) If you squeeze yourself to always return your fingers to the home position, you are on the right way. Look at the keys while you are typing. Typing without looking will later be achieved with ease.

The Proper Position
Whenever you type, place your forefingers on F and J. These keys are marked by little bars or small dents on most keyboards (red dots in picture). The other fingers go on the keys on the left resp. right. After some time, your fingers will seek this position themselves. The thumb (choose one) is responsible for operating the space bar. (The other one does nothing, so it’s actually only “typing with nine fingers”, but we don’t care.)

Greyscale version for better printing results
The colors in the picture indicate which key should be pressed by which finger. The little fingers are very important, they press the shift, return, and backspace keys. The shift keys are used crosswise: for ‘left’ keys, use the right shift key, and vice versa. At the beginning, you will propably find the lower left part of the keyboard (ZXCV) somewhat inconvenient, but you will get used to it. The keys B and Y lie almost exactly in the middle, but it is advisible to press them with the left resp. right finger as show in the figure.

Getting Faster
At the beginning you will propably type slower than you used to, but you will notice that you get comfortable with the keyboard pretty fast. It took me about two days of modest effort to reach an acceptable typing speed, and about two weeks to be as fast as I were with the six-scrambled-finger ’system’ I used before. Remember: After typing a key, always return the finger to its base position.

Typing Blindly
Perhaps the bigest advantage of learning proper typing is that looking at the screen while typing enables you to correct typos immediately, without having to use the cursor keys etc. If you have gained practise in ten-finger typing (let’s say after some days), you can start trying not to look at the keyboard to find the keys. It will at first seem impossible, but try it. If you get the wrong key, use the backspace key, even if you’ve typed some right letters afterwards. Erasing a misspelled word and retyping it is faster than moving the cursor, correcting the word, and going back to the end of the line. Do not try never to look at the keyboard. Hitting the right keys with the wrong finger (or hitting the wrong key!) is much worse than “peeking”. It took me about two weeks to do some (slow) blind typing, but even today, I look at the keyboard when typing passwords (they are not printed on the screen). Oh, and do not worry about the numbers and symbols in the top row of the keyboard (and the function keys, and combinations like Alt-F4, etc.). These seldom occur in the middle of a word, so it is not a disadvantage not to find the 5 or & key bindly. Look at the keyboard to see where it is, and be happy with that.

Is It Worth the Effort?
Definitely yes. You will type faster and with less errors. And it will take you at most a month to learn it, with only modest extra effort over your daily typing. The Right Keyboard Keyboards differ in two ways: key layout and mechanics. The layout is what is printed on the key caps. Most of the world uses some variant of the QWERTY layout (e.g., Germany QWERTZ, France AZERTY). Use any you like, and stick with it. I personally prefer QWERTY, as programming needs lots of {[]}, but there are no umlauts (äöü) (there are ways around this). The Dvorak layout is a completely different layout aiming to ease typing. Keyboard mechanics come with/without key click, keys using springs, plastic foil keyboards, etc. Sometimes, changing the keyboard makes you more comfortable, so try some other keyboards. It is a great relief to use a hand cushion. I made one myself using a 3cm thick piece of foam rubber and covered it with linen. The heel of hands rest on the cushion and no latent force is needed for lifting shoulders and arms.