Can you type without looking at the keyboard?

[PinkSpider]

Yeah, learnt in my teens. Me and a mate would sit on chat all night and I'd generally be sat in the dark. Never counted my WPM and make the odd mistake but outside of the number row (I prefer the number pad after working in an office for 15 years and I went ten key less for my home board as I mainly game on it/ use it for entertainment). Annoyingly the apostrophe is in a slightly different place to a regular UK keyboard as is the enter so in the dark I sometimes post stuff when hitting the apostrophe but general lettering and every other punctuation am fine.

Keyboard has lights on too but generally I only have them turn on when a keypress is registered. Allows me to reset position in the dark if I get my position lost.

 

[Vex]

yes.

Click to shrink...

OOOOOOF.

Wow. That's crazy to me. Jeez.

I guess this is why I've never taken to playing m/kb on PC. I can't fuckin find the damn keys to play as fast as controller :'c

 

[Bing147]

Interesting.... I always wondered if people actually remembered the layout of a keyboard once they learned how to type or they just wing it.

I've been stressing over not knowing where every letter was....

Click to shrink...

I mean, you kind of have to for it to work. Theres a helpful word scheme people do to memorize it.

Quick Ask Zoey
What Stops X-rays
Even Dogs Can't
Red Fish Vanish
Then Grow Bigger
Yaks Hear Voices
Under Jack's Mattress
I Keep Commas
Over Long Periods
Peanuts

Worked for me, lol

 

[diakyu]

I can do it but I can't break the habit of looking at the keyboard. I am slower when not looking but I've been typing with a keyboard for so long I can "feel" when the keys are right under my fingers. I had a class in school about this that used a keyboard cover but you can bet your ass I cheated on that shit so I could play DIno Run

 

[Bear and bird]

For the most part, yes. I don't use the touch method or any other official typing techniques.

 

[Deleted member 1849]

I can, for 2 different keyboard layouts - Qwerty and Colemak. Just takes 10-15 minutes for my brain to adjust when I change layouts.

Taught myself first with Qwerty, but years later found out that my touch typing was very much not by the book, and when I learnt Colemak I also used it as a chance to correct my typing technique.

My advice is to just use something like https://www.keybr.com/ and build your touch typing up letter by letter over time.

My office keyboard is actually characterless. Something along these lines:

 

[Thorrgal]

Let me try and see how it goes

OK I can do it slowly

 

[julia crawford]

let's see, i can do (this), {this}, i can even do @this without looking

programmers are just glorified typists after all

but i'm not very fast, just a usable speed

 

[Vex]

My advice is to just use something like https://www.keybr.com/ and build your touch typing up letter by letter over time.

Click to shrink...

Just loaded that up. This is fun af! I like it. It tracks a lot of progress too! It has algorithms that know which letters you are not good with!

Thank you friend c':

Edit: apparently I am bad with Ts and Ls. OOF

 

[Hoggle]

Yes. But apparently in another language that I don't really understand.

Sjeivevjskhakjsbhs

Welsh or Swedish, maybe?

 

[Patriiick]

Pretty much. Have to look down every now and again. I'm just self taught. Classes were never a thing at school.

 

[Baalzebup]

I was mostly there even before just by using a keyboard a lot, but I took an optional typing class back in the 7th or 8th grade. It was even done with proper type-writers instead of computers so you couldn't erase mistakes or anything. I reached a pretty good WPM by the end of it, though that part has slowed down a bit due to not typing huge walls of text that often.

 

[Siresly]

yes i can tupe without looking and i onlt dud tgrfour ryfivetyosuseven typieughbnfuck it

I have to recalibrate every now and then. Or it's evenrually off to tupo town.

 

[Vex]

tupo town.

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Is that a location in a JRPG? Lmaoo

 

[Siresly]

Is that a location in a JRPG? Lmaoo

Click to shrink...

It's a quaint, hospitable little town where all the inhabitants lived in harmont.

 

[Mivey]

Had a class in secondary school that taught you how to type properly. Pretty old fashioned thing, the software for it ran on DOS and I remember it was a bit annoying to get it running on the XP machines they had at school.

Some symbols on the number rows sometimes still give me trouble, and I look for them, but aside from them, pretty much 100% of the time without looking.

 

[Drowner]

for just letters, yes. i have to look at the keyboard for punctuation. before smart phones/ touch screens were a thing i could type on my phone without looking at it. i miss that.

 

[hiredhand]

Kinda. I will still glance at the keyboard from time to time.

Using a work computer with an American keyboard but Finnish keyboard settings (I need my äs and ös) has taught me to find all the common special characters pretty well without looking.

 

[Delicious Waffles]

Kind of. I make a mistake here and there but if I get in a zone, get outta my way!

 

[Catshade]

Only for letters and the right side num pad. I still have to look down to find punctuations, special characters, and the numbers above the letters.

 

[TheMadTitan]

OOOOOOF.

Wow. That's crazy to me. Jeez.

I guess this is why I've never taken to playing m/kb on PC. I can't fuckin find the damn keys to play as fast as controller :'c

Click to shrink...

I use an MMO mouse for that. WASD for movement, space for jump, the buttons to the immediate left and right of WASD for some stuff, and everything else on the mouse.

 

[Ravelle]

Yeah I can type blind and quite fast too.

Didn't have any typing lessons, just came with growing up with always having a computer around and being in IT.

 

[Hilarious_Bearious]

Learned to touch type in high school. I used to work in market research, where I had to type what people were saying verbatim in real time. Now I'm a code monkey. Touch typing has been invaluable to me. The thought of not having this skill in 2022 blows my mind. Are people looking at the on-screen keyboard at the bottom of their phones to type with their thumbs too? That sounds difficult.

 

[FinFunnels]

Yes, I do it all time.

For me, it's mostly muscle memory. If you asked me where "Y" is on the keyboard, I probably couldn't answer right away. But fingers just know where to go when I'm typing lol

I first learned to type using the "chicken finger" method, which is when you type using only your pointer fingers. But that pissed off my grandpa, so he bought me Mavis Beacon, Jump Start Typing, Mario Typing, and a bunch of other games and made me play them until I learned how to type right 😅

 

[wbloop]

They were teaching us touch-typing back in school, but I never really utilised it. I can still type quite fast without looking through sheer muscle memory, but there are typos inbound, especially when I need special characters, which makes learning how to code... not that easy.

 

[matrix-cat]

Yep. My index fingers find the little nubbins on their own and then it all just happens automatically. 80ish WPM, learnt it all just from being on forums all my life lol.

 

[The Stig]

For the most part. My punctuation outside of the very common keys and the number row and its alts can be kind of shaky. And I do have to say that the age of voice chat has done a number on my speed, not that I was ever blazing fast or anything.

Took a keyboarding class in middle-school, but really I credit EverQuest with most of my typing ability.

 

[Mirage]

I can do that and I just learned from use. I feel like stuff like playing MMOs helped out with my typing as well. Some more uncommon stuff I would need to double check for though, but if I'm just typing normally I don't need to look.

 

[Kudo]

My keycaps are blank, that should answer the question.

 

[Mórríoghain]

But can you type ö, ü, ı, on an ENG keyboard without looking at it? HUH??

 

[phranc]

I voted no but 3/4 of the time I can. I usually initially start typing without it and make few mistakes. Always look for special characters and mostly when I start typing texts.

 

[LordRuyn]

Yes, I learned proper touch typing during the 2020 lockdown. I am however stuck in the mid-80 WPM hell. I have been practicing over a year now and I just can't get out of it. I've been occasionally hitting 90 WPM but not consistently and only once in a blue moon. Anyone got any tips? My goal is 100 WPM.

 

[AlgusUnderdunk]

I owe it all to Typing of the Dead.

 

[Pirateluigi]

Last time I tested I was just over 100 wpm. We had typing class in 6th or 7th grade, and since I use a computer ever day the skill never went away. In class we used Mavis Beacon but I also had Mario Teaches Typing at home to practice.

 

[plagiarize]

I owe it all to Typing of the Dead.

Click to shrink...

I wouldn't say I owe it all to typing of the dead, but it sure as hell helped a lot.

 

[SCUMMbag]

uwa

 

[Bufbaf]

Everyone laughed at me when taking typewriting courses in school instead of French. Now look at me.

 

[Arex]

Generally yea, I usually just need to see the keyboard once before I start typing.

 

[Dr Doom]

Yes, self thought
I used to play the Megaman game typing. that didn't work

but just using it during work. I got used to it

 

[Small Red Boy]

Yes, I am self-taught. Like never used a program or whatever, one day I decieded to try to stop looking at the keyboard and with a little practice I was able to.

 

[samoscratch]

Yes, I had to take a typing class in school, funny enough I don't use the correct finger placement though.

 

[JustinBB7]

Been using a computer for gaming since I was like 7 or something so yea I don't have to look. Think my fingers are permanently on wasd

 

[Alcoremortis]

I used this old-ass typewriter book as a kid for the basic techniques, though it took until instant messaging to actually get faster. But like keeping your fingers on the home row is surprisingly effective and now there's all sorts of typing games that force you to keep your eyes on the screen and remember the general keyboard layout.

 

[CDX]

Self taught. Looking at the keyboard was a horrible habit of mine. I only stopped when I got completely blank keyboard keys and forced myself to use them. The habit was so strong it was a small period of hell to break it, but I eventually learned to type without looking.

 

[Shopolic]

Easily in 2 languages: English and Persian.

 

[Menchin]

I learned touch typing myself when I was in high school, purely because of the sheer volume of essays they had us write

I can do it for QWERTY English and another layout for 4 other languages which use pretty similar alphabets

 

[Lkr]

yes, on qwerty layout at least. a combo of self taught and things like mavis beacon in the late 90s did it for me. something about being into computers back then made it feel like the bare minimum necessity to me to "get good" at operating one lol
i would probably be about 30% as efficient at getting work done in comparison as well? i'm usually doing things between 3 monitors, looking at the keyboard as well would cause too much hassle

by the time we had "typing class" in middle school, I was breezing through the virtual lessons. but like don't feel too bad about this OP, because staying inside on the computer your entire childhood might not be everyone's preferred style

 

[Dreams-Visions]

lol my keys don't even have labeling on them.

 

[Nateo]

If I am not thinking about it yes. But as soon as I start thinking about if I can touch type I slow way the fuck down its weird af.

 

[Kito]

I can, and I'm a very fast typer, but I hamstring my abilities by only typing primarily with my index and middle fingers per hand instead of all 5. A silly habit I picked up in elementary school and never let go of decades later.