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Colemak via Tarmak

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Impressive progress.

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or unimpressive stasis?

I think my fingers may be topping out.

I believe that you reach a 'genetic' speed through day to day typing which if you want to exceed you have to actually specifically train.

At just shy of 80wpm I'm thinking maybe thats good enough though?

I certainly don't feel like typing is in anyway an impediment to my work as a software engineer..

(the d-h mod still isn't 100% though so theres prob a few wpm to be had there over time)

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It's certainly around my "genetic" max so I can relate completely. My plan is to push right above 80 WPM eventually, but no further for me I don't think.

FPS players know that people have different "twitch" speed for instance, so it's no surprise if we have different speed typing capacity as well.

Last edited by DreymaR (27-May-2018 19:58:17)

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I'm not sure where the ceiling is, but I guess there are quite some factors playing into what is our typing speed, there are finger flexibility, and there is the speed that one manages to write accurately. There also the shape that you are in for the day, I know that some days I'm way speedier and a lot more correct than others for example.

But the thing is that ceilings can be pushed through, I'm doing rubiks cube speed solving for example, and in the beginning I had a ceiling on about a minute per solve, and it seemed not very likely to get any better from there. The next plateu was at around 40 sek, and I spent a couple of months just going around that speed before suddenly I managed 35 sek solves, I'm now at 29-30 seconds, and I'm back on a plateu again, there are different things that are holding me back, lookahead, flow and calmness are important just like in typing, it's quite a lot of an analogue really when one things about it.

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i think you're absolutely right sotolf - but specific effortful training is required

I'm not sure I have a requirement to be any quicker?

I once read a book, bounce, by matthew syed. One of the things it covered is how sportspeople 'chunk' actions together in order to perform better/more accurately/faster

Its a mechanism for dealing with the complexity of it, a bit like writing functions in software.

I'm pretty convinced that better typing involves 'chunking' at ever more granular levels, i.e. you move from having to think about letters, to bi-grams, tri-grams, whole words and even groups of words - devolving more and more to the fast unconscious type 1 thinking away from the slow effortful type 2 thinking (terminology borrowed from kahnemann tversky et al)

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Quite. Good speed typists have some quite long n-grams ingrained, usually commonly occurring word snippets. That way they have less "actions" to consider in their flow. These chunks may also involve alternative fingering at the higher levels.

Last edited by DreymaR (30-May-2018 14:06:45)

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bph said:

i think you're absolutely right sotolf - but specific effortful training is required

Yeah, I kind of took that as a given. To push through a ceiling there is of course specific training that is needed. We have a saying in cubing, go slow to go fast. It's not necessarily raw speed that gets you through things, with typing there is stuff like ngrams, and more that really is fruitful for practice. There is a reason why we mostly train a lot of accuracy when it comes to typing, not only because it really helps being accurate, but because it makes you think better about how you write, you have to write more consciously to get higher accuracy, it drills in movements and lookahead in a way that increases speed, even though that's not the focus of the excercise, or at least that's my experience.

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(b ̄◇ ̄)b

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well and truly plateau'd DR - but I'm pretty cool with that ;)

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Typeracer - Last 10 Av. 68. Fastest 84

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Monkeytype - 77

Last edited by bph (31-Mar-2021 17:46:15)
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Nice! And good to see you again, BPH!  (✿◠‿◠)

Have you discovered Monkeytype yet? That's where I take my tests these days. Very configurable, and doesn't think that 'Indian' is a top 200 word in English. Heh.

See the BigBag Training topic if you wish.

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Have switched the m and k keys around as recommended by dreymar/stevep99

Also ditched the wide mod (still have angle mod). I had a good look at my hands and arms position and concluded the difference between wide and non-wide was negligible. I'll see how it goes...

Also started using monkeytype (ooh monkeytype contains ms and ks... nasty)

Last edited by bph (22-Oct-2021 11:06:37)
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bph said:

I had a good look at my hands and arms position and concluded the difference between wide and non-wide was negligible.

The 1u width difference isn't the main attraction of the Wide mod. Rather, it's the lessened pinky load, better access to several keys (Backspace, Enter, RShift, and, in particular, AltGr!) and the flexibility of the bracket keys in the middle that I consider the biggest advantages.

*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
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I think the single biggest advantage is the improved thumb key access it brings.

Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.

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I am very tempted to get an Atreus also, I note keyboardco sell them. You recommend?

They do a silent box brown.

Good point on the pinky load benefit of wide mod.

I'd be a wise man to use seniply right, if I go down either the corne or atreus route? ;)

how long did the atreus take for you to adapt to it? (maybe not a fair question if you were coming from a halfway house matias ergo keyboard?)

Last edited by bph (01-Nov-2021 20:04:00)
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Oh, that's interesting, I didn't know Keyboard Co had got the Atreus in. I got my Ergo Pro from them originally. The biggest barrier to switching to non-traditional boards for me was always that they were mostly self-build kits, so it's good to see them increasingly being sold as consumer products!

The Atreus wasn't too hard to adapt to - I did do a short post about it at the time, but it weirdly it seems to have been vanished(!).  If you're already using angle mod, it's mostly pretty easy to adapt to. Most of the problem I had was with the index finger keys, e.g. P B G M L, as they are noticeably different. It only took a couple of days or so to get used it. As you say I was already used to using 4 thumb keys on my Ergo Pro, so that might be a factor that made switching easier. The Atreus is a solid choice I think, but I haven't tried the corne or most of the other designs for comparison though - but they look fairly similar for the most part. If you try Seniply let me know how it goes, I'm still weighing up possible changes here and there, so am open to improvements.

Last edited by stevep99 (04-Nov-2021 11:02:43)

Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.

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shame that post has vanished. Would like to have read that!

It does look like a lovely bit of kit.

Probably slightly easier to carry round than a corne as its one piece, plus the benefit of not having to build the beggar!

copper switch is 20 quid cheaper, but I fancy getting the quietest one I can so should probably get the switch with 'silent' in its title?

Last edited by bph (04-Nov-2021 20:32:06)
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Bought an Atreus, arriving tomorrow supposedly.

I'm setting my expectations low in as much as I'm not expecting to be able to type on it at any speed for months!

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Grats!

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OK so I'm typing this on the new Atreus.

I can see its going to take me a while to get used to.

I already have a million questions for Steve!

I've installed seniply

Last edited by bph (12-Nov-2021 16:23:58)
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Nice! I'm sure it won't be as bad as you think to get used to.

Will be interesting to read your experience to see how it compares with mine.

Bracing myself for 10^6 questions!!

Using Colemak-DH with Seniply.

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when typing numbers, are you tucking your right thumb under to hit the layer key right of the space then typing numbers with the same hand?

IMG-20211112-145312442.jpg

how does this compare with your atreus Steve? Have I got the keys in the right places?

Last edited by bph (12-Nov-2021 21:21:47)
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