I recently switched to Colemak. Colemak is an alternative keyboard layout for typing¹ It only changes 17 keys compared to the normal QWERTY layout, so it should be faster to learn than something like Dvorak.

The Colemak keyboard layout. Only the letter keys, the ‘:’ key, and the Caps Lock key are changed from QWERTY.

It took me less than a day to be able to know where all of the keys are without having to look, but my typing speed was abysmal. Over a month² after that, I was up to around 30-40 WPM. My usual typing speed in QWERTY was around 70 WPM, so I still had a ways to go.

I stumbled upon keybr.com and decided to give it a go. In less than a week (about 4 hours of practice) I have already improved to 60 WPM. That’s an increase of about 5 WPM/Hour! That’s a lot! I would never have expected I could so substantially improve my typing speed with such little practice.

keybr.com has some examples on the site of anonymized user profiles, for example:

Example #1 from 30 to 70 WPM after 4 hours 20 minutes of practicing in the course of 15 days

So it seems my progress was not unusual.

Typing is so much more comfortable now that my speed is close to my old QWERTY 70 WPM, especially since Colemak puts the most-used keys on the home row, so you can type a lot of words without having to twist your hands all over the keyboard like spiders playing Twister.

Typing faster is a surprisingly easy skill to learn with some dedicated practice, at least if you already know how to touch type. Go give it a try! Or switch to Colemak first like I did, but use dedicated practice to get the rough period out of the way quickly.

In English ↩
Without any dedicated practice ↩

Secret Rich Text Copyer for Substack