INTERESTING
How to learn touch typing
and stop worrying about symbols on a keycaps

Intro

It's no secret that our store sells keycaps without symbols, some customers are stunned and decide to get the standard keycaps with symbols elsewhere.

In this article, you will find out what is touch typing and why you should consider to switch to blank keycaps.
What is touch typing?
Description from Wikipedia:

Touch typing (also called blind typing, or touch keyboarding) is a style of typing. Although the phrase refers to typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys—specifically, a touch typist will know their location on the keyboard through muscle memory—the term is often used to refer to a specific form of touch typing that involves placing the eight fingers in a horizontal row along the middle of the keyboard (the home row) and having them reach for specific other keys.

What are the benefits?
In increasing speed, comfort, accuracy, as well as in reducing the cognitive load when typing.

With touch typing, you will stop constantly switching your gaze from the keyboard to the monitor and thus will not waste energy searching for the right key, everything happens automatically.
Your fingers are always on the home row and even if they move a few keys in any direction while typing, they should always come back to their starting position.
With this rule, you will never get lost and find any key by touch only. The speed and efficiency of typing will be much better.
This is the same as driving a car and looking only at the road, and not switching between the steering wheel, pedals and the road.
Since now you will only look straight at the monitor, the strain on your neck will be greatly reduced and your posture will also improve.

How to learn this method?
In the case of ergonomic split keyboards, the thumb finger is located on the so-called thumb cluster (a row of keys made for the thumb), the remaining four fingers on each hand are used for typing.
  1. Always keep your fingers on the home row and always return to it after you type something. If you can't get back, then mark the F and J keys with any method at hand. For example, put a piece of tape on F and J keys for a difference in tactility when pressing them will help to get accustomed to this method faster.
  2. Remember the layout that you are using, as well as all the modifier keys that you have assigned. If you have started using our keyboard recently, then print out the layout and keep it for a week in front of you so that you can check it at any moment, discard it for the second week and try to manually recreate the layout from your memory with a pen and paper. For the third week, the layout should certainly sit in your memory and no more physical cheat sheets will be needed.
  3. Practice in online typing programs (monkeytype.com, typingclub.com, typetest.io, keybr.com, 10fastfingers.com, etc.) for at least 10 minutes a day.
What the blank keycaps has anything to do with this?
Keycaps without symbols should motivate you to learn the layout and the touch typing method, such a straightforward way does not give any hints or opportunities to return back to less efficient typing methods.

Well, as a bonus, you get the always popular aesthetics of minimalism and compliments from colleagues :)

This article is brought to you by:

Author — Evgeny Sin

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