My touch typing journey

Touch typing is the practice of typing using all of one's fingers without looking at the keyboard. The opposite is hunt-and-peck typing, i.e. what most people do: typing by looking at the keys and only using a few fingers one each hand.

I don't consider hunt-and-peck typing to be a major issue for people who's jobs don't consist of typing a lot, however, in the case of a software developer, I'd say it helps a lot to know how to use the keyboard the most efficient way possible.

I have been a hunt-and-peck person all my life, until I noticed that one of my dorm room friend at university was typing very differently from me. I was using three fingers on both hands and I had to constantly switch focus between looking at the keyboard and the screen. My friend was not only looking exclusively at the screen while typing, he also had insane speed (at least to my eyes). He was the one who introduced me to touch typing, I soon decided to give it a try. (Thanks Dávid, I'm still grateful you set me off on this path.)

When I decided to learn how to type properly, I was typing at around 35 WPM (word per minute), which is an acceptable speed for the hunt-and-peck technique. My goal with touch typing was to reduce context switching caused by having to move my gaze between the monitor and the keyboard and to increase my typing speed to better match the speed of my thoughts. At that moment in 2017, I considered 60 WPM as the optimal typing speed to reach and gave myself one month to reach it.

Boy, was I ever wrong about how hard it is to get rid of years worth of muscle memory and building a new one. I used the excellent TypingClub website to start learning and it took me more than a month just to learn the letters on the base layer of the keyboard and type at around 25 WPM. I haven't even touched the number row, symbols and the Shift layer (characters accessible by pressing Shift and another key at the same time). It seemed to much effort to continue, so I gradually returned to my old way of typing and haven't changed it for a few years.

My interest in touch typing has been reignited only in 2024, when I discovered a software engineer YouTuber, the VIM god, ThePrimeagen. I love the content he creates and also love his take on typing technique. He argues, that typing speed is a major bottleneck in software development: if you don't type fast enough (at least 80 WPM based on his opinion), it limits how much you can experiment and iterate on your code. Nobody writes perfect code on the first try but you will be a lot less likely to want to experiment with different implementations when typing is a major hurdle to you.

This really changed my perspective and decided to try learning touch typing for serious this time. In the meantime I have also become a huge ergo keyboard nerd but that is a story for a different time. So in 2024 I made a plan and decided to not stop practicing until I can consistently do the 80 WPM suggested by ThePrimeagen on any kind of text, be it English, Hungarian (my mother tongue) or any kind of programming language.

The plan consisted of the following:

1. Restart TypingClub lessons from zero and finish every single task on the website. There are 686 lessons on the website and at the beginning touch typing is very tiring both for the hands and the mind, so this took multiple months to complete.
2. Periodically do some races on TypeRacer, to compare myself to other typists from the whole world.
3. Do daily tests on MonkeyType. The site has some nice graphs that show your progress, which kept me motivated to not stop. My favorite test types are the 60 seconds English and 120 seconds English 1k. I mainly do 120 seconds tests to make sure my results actually reflect a speed I can keep up consistently.

After finishing all the TypingClub I was finally able to touch type faster than my original hunt-and-peck speed, at around 45 WPM. I continued with MonkeyType and TypeRacer and here I am at the end of 2025: I'm averaging 60-80 WPM depending on the type of text. After almost two years there is still much to improve, but at least I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. 😄

At the moment of writing I'm almost top 20% on TypeRacer and top 34% percent on MonkeyType in the 60 seconds English test. I'm not stopping, but I'll attach some pictures of my stats as I feel like bragging a bit about my achievements until now. I'll continue with ~10 minutes daily practice sessions for a few more months and I'll probably post an update in a new post.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post!