As someone who wants to be a (potentially solo) games developer, obviously typing is very important. I’ll be honest, I do a style very similar to hunt and peck. I use two fingers per hand and glance at the keyboard about 30-40% of the time; occasionally a 3rd finger gets in on the action but not much. On a good day I can do about 60-65 WPM accurately with this style. Now 60 wpm on a modified hunt and peck style is incredibly good, but it also shows I can do MUCH better, especially for programming. My hunt and peck style works with whole words much better than characters, so I slow to a crawl while coding.

Touch typing, which I’m sure you’re all familiar with, is superior; yet it must also be learned. It takes a bit of discipline to learn touch-typing, as it is infuriatingly slow and inaccurate at first. I have been told many a time that it is a worthwhile transition however. Therefore, I intend to spend the new few weeks in typing agony while I learn to touch type. I’ll be making a small post on my progress every few days, to give a picture of how much time and effort it takes.

Hopefully this will encourage a few of you guys to try touch typing too, as if you’re going into a field where you need to spend even 1 hour on average per day typing then you can save a fair chunk of time. My goal after learning touch typing is to be able to do 100 wpm with minimal error, let’s see if I can do it!

This post was written in about 7 minutes (not including proofing) using my hunt and peck style(~ 59 wpm). I will never use hunt and peck to type on Shattered Pixel again and will be recording how long writing each post takes me until the end of this project. So far I have progressed to the point where I can do about 70 wpm with minimal errors on the home row keys with my eyes shut…. After spending 10 minutes practicing the lesson =S. I shut my eyes to prevent myself glancing at the keyboard or throwing it across the room because I typed another goddamn ‘f’ instead of a ‘d’.

I am using TypeOnline.co.uk to help me learn, and testing my skills at TypeRacer.com. Both are awesome sites and well worth checking out. Type racer is especially awesome, even if you don’t want to learn to touch type.