Learning to type, again

I believe spending time improving the efficiency and speed of your workflow is just as important as your work itself.

As a programmer (and in many other professions), I spend the vast amount of my time in-front of a keyboard, so why not optimise my typing?

This is why last month I picked up a Lily58 mechanical keyboard.

This keyboard is described as a split 6x4 column staggered ortholinear grid with a 4 key thumb cluster.

You may not know what any of that means right now but I'll be getting into why these features are so good.

The Split

A split keyboard allows you to position each half of the keyboard shoulder width apart, eliminating ulnar deviation (your wrists pointing outwards) and reducing shoulder tension.

Ortholinear

The idea of an ortholinear layout rather than the standardised staggered layout is down to simple biomechanics, your fingers extend up and down, so the keys should also be directly ontop of one another.

Thumb clusters

On a standard keyboard, both of your thumbs are resigned to pressing the space bar, this is a huge inefficiency. The thumb cluster allows you to map common keys such as Backspace and Enter without moving your hand from the home row.

The Learning process

It took a week or so to get accustomed to the keyboard, On the first day I was averaging 7WPM (Words Per Minute) which is horrible considering on a standard keyboard I can type at about 120WPM. I realised that I had to completely rewire my brain and unlearn all of the bad typing habits I had developed over many years.

For the next week I religiously practiced for 2-3 hours a day on TypingClub (opens in a new tab) and this really helped hammer-in proper typing practices and keeping your fingers on the home row, I'd highly recommend this resource for anyone looking to improve their typing speed and touch typing.

My thoughts a month later

Now that I'm fairly accustomed to using the Lily58, I can say for sure that it has improved my typing and removed any pains accrued from sitting at a keyboard for 12+ hours a day.

Stay Blazingly fast.