Efficient computer use

of things going in the background that kept me from writing more recently. Work has regularly left me brain-drained, and I’ve found myself in a position where I desperately need to focus on moving my career forward.

With this came

ion that I use my computer in a way that’s likely significantly more efficient than most people. There are three reasons for this.

1. I type faster than most people.
2. I was not scared to take the leap and use a tiling window manager.
3. I am using keyboard shortcuts wherever I can.

For this short blog, let’s look at just typing.

One of the most powerful ways to increase the pleasure of using electronics is to become adept at typing. And when I say pleasure, I really do mean it. Typing quickly with your hands doing the minimum amount of movememt is, in fact, an experience unlike any other. Particularly when your co-workers can’t keep up.

Therefore, here’s a short list of basic-yet-super-good resources for understanding typing, improving your speed, or even completely changing the layout you can use to spend less time typing, and more time thinking.

1. Monkeytype - a great typing training website, includes multiple lists of words (start with English/English200 - it’s the 200 most common words in English), options for different tests, punctuation, capitalization, etc. etc. If you’re starting here, your goal should be to first learn proper touch-typing technique, and then get to a reasonable speed (say, 80 WPM) on the 60s default English test.

2. Keybr - this one is different. It’s a progressive training website that starts with the home row (for multiple common layouts), and adds keys once you hit about 40WPM with them. It automatically generates words using common bigrams and trigrams, leading do a very well-rounded word list for training. If you’re learning a new layout, Keybr is indispensable for the first few hours, until you start being able to feel your way around the keys.

3. https://bit.ly/keyboard-layouts-doc - This is a document that goes into detail into the various layouts, the mechanics of typing, what to look for in a layout, how to type efficiently, and why QWERTY is bad (it really is). Well-worth the read. It’s a lot of theory, which may not be the most interesting thing in the world, but understanding it is critical if you’re looking to dive deep into optimization.

4. DreymaR’s Big Bag of Kbd Tricks - DreymaR went to great lengths to make Colemak-DH accessible to everyone, and with that, he developed a wide variety of tools. If you choose to learn Colemak, his website is great. If you choose to go with something else, DreymaR’s ExtEnd layer will still save you effort. The idea is to have a layer that includes the common nav keys, so you hold the modifier button for instance, and have your arrow keys right on your home row. It’s a huge time saver, and I personally don’t think I can go back to moving my hand to the arrows all the time.

5. OXEY’s Playground - An amazing project. This website lets you drag and drop keys to change the layout so see exactly how the relevant statistics go up and down. This way you can evaluate alternative keyboard layouts and check if your desired changes make sense. If you’re experimenting with improving the layout you’re using for yourself, that’s the place to start, imo.

Those are really great resources, I think, and learning to type faster than the average of 40 WPM is kinda… necessary, if you work with computers at all.

I like to think about it in simple terms: if I type faster, then the time I spend thinking is increased by the time I save typing.

• If I type 40 words (a short note) in a minute, that minute is all spent typing that note.
• If I type 40 words in 30 seconds… I get to keep those 30 seconds to do with as I please, or to move to other tasks.

Here’s a short table to illustrate how much typing speed affects your performance:

Time spent typing 50 words (about the length of a short note):

So for what should be a short note, if you go from 50 to 60 WPM, you will save 10 seconds. If you are typing a 150 word email, that’s half a minute. And while the savings fade around the 140 WPM mark… that’s still a hell of a lot faster than 40.

But the important thing is… if you’re poking at your keyboard with two (or even four) fingers, you’re missing out a lot. If you’re just not very comfortable using a computer, and you’re at say, 20, or 30. Going up to 60-70 doesn’t take long at all.

And you’ll see improvement really quickly, simply by learning where the keys are, and using all of your fingers. It only takes a few hours - and as you can see in the table above, if you type on a regular basis, that time comes back to you pretty quickly.

Learning to type faster pays for itself.

Join the FSF. ���������������������������