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This test is a bit..silly to me. I am an enthusiast of mechanical keyboards, own a few, and have enjoyed typing for as long as I can remember. On top of that, I can type quite fast - depending on which keyboard I am using as it does affect me a bit I reach about 720cpm on my mx blues (ducky keyboard) and about 670cpm on my KBP keyboard with Matias Quiet Click switches, which is my slowest board. (on the 10 fast fingers typing tests)

Which is quite a good speed for typing, and I have _never_ found that to really help me at all when coding. Usually when coding you are still thinking about what to write and the speed at which you write code is never actually hindered by the typing speed that you have.

There are a few exceptions to this, as I like doing live-coding when giving presentations it does help me write the code faster, but I already know what I am going to write to a large degree and people seem to like the live coding.

But for day-to-day programming, I don't feel like this matters..

5 comments

For me, it's not really about typing fast, it is more about typing without making mistakes. I find hitting the delete key too often is frustrating and it interrupts my flow. Unfortunately I never mastered that skill, I can type quite fast, but most of it is errorsome. (eg, I made three mistakes alone typing the word unfortunately..)

You should check out typera.net for in my opinion, more realistic typing tests. I just tried the 10 fast fingers test and got 750 on my first try on a cheap keyboard (I maxed out at a tad over 700 on typerA where it uses random sentences albeit much more difficult generally).

Thank you for the recommendation, I will surely check that one out! And you got a nice score, congratz!

A more expensive keyboard does not make you type better in my opinion, but it does improve the comfort of typing for a longer time. It also depends on what you are used to.

Another one that is fun is typeracer, it let's you race against others by finishing a typing test as fast as possible. These are fragments from literature that you are typing and thus adds some difficulty as well compared to 10-fast-fingers, as you need to keep in mind punctuation :-)

It matters just for saving you the annoyance of looking at your keyboard searching for a specific key. The less you look at what you write, the more prone to error you become.

I have thought of getting a mechanical keyboard, but I don't think I need it. I have been typing a lot on a standard Acer keyboard for a couple years, until the W key dome was gone, making it really hard to use with gaming. After that, I switched to the light Logitech K700 keyboard with flat keys. Typing on it feels good and I don't need to type fast, I want to type accurately. And in the end they are pretty quiet :).

Once you get one, it is really hard to go back to a non-mechanical keyboard. And quietness is quite important for anyone working together with other people. That is why at work I use a keyboard with Matias Quiet Click switches. They are not that much louder than a regular rubberdome keyboard :-)

It's all preference in the end though!

Agreed,if the bottleneck is CPM/WPM ,you probably need better tooling in the form of scaffolding/boilerplate. But for those who can't touch type this could reduce the cognitive load of hunting-pecking. I need something like this (or typing.io) that will let me configure auto-complete so that it matches Sublime.

Maybe you need (to make) a typing tutor in Sublime?