I need a new keyboard. Those little nubs are worn off mine and I’m constantly putting my fingers on the wrong keys unless I keep looking down at it.
Is anybody gonna tell this oblivious 30 year old who’s not particularly bad at typing what the lines are for?
Doesn’t really have to do whether youre good or bad. When they teach you officially, they show you that the j and f are the home row where your index fingers go. If you’re self taught you might not know that and that’s totally fine as long as you can still type.
Wow, they really don’t teach you kids typing anymore, huh.
So you can place your index fingers on the correct key without looking at the keyboard.
Huh, the more you know. Cheers!
I don’t see how one wouldn’t naturally get that, no offense. I mean, if one didn’t paticularly really ever use a keyboard and typed like gen-x or olders, with index fingers, sure.
But surely if you’re 30 and used a keyboard all your life you don’t need to look at the keyboard while typing…?
No offense. I may just be way overusing one since I was a teenager idk.
I’ve seen an incredible number of people who were never taught to properly touchtype and where each finger goes and developed bizarre techniques to type with 4, 6, or 8 fingers that may be almost as fast as the proper one but horrendously non-ergonomic. Ubiquity of staggered layouts (instead of proper ortholinear) does not help — it’s almost like it’s begging to type Z with ring finger and X with middle one.
I touch type , and yes I figured out what the lines were for… But I definitely don’t use them as reference points when I’m typing.
That’s the nipples. You rub em and the keyboards like ‘hey fj r over here!’
The best typing training I ever got was IRC. You had to learn to type fast or some idiot wouldn’t know how wrong he was.
This definitely prepared me for a career where 90% of my interaction with coworkers is via chat.
I took typing lessons back in the mid ‘90’s, which was VERY uncommon for teens to do. When we got the first online multiplayer games, they only had text chat. I certainly had the fastest, foulest mouth in chat 😂
I had a high school class in the mid-90s that taught you how to type. It was taught on typewriters.
There we go!
I spent more time socializing on World of Warcraft than actually leveling. Had lots of friends, and since been happily married to my best one!
Touch typing skills were essential, especially mid-combat.
…Or being the undiagnosed ADHD socialite I was, keeping like 8 running whisper and guild chats going in the game’s single chat window at once… 😂
Arguing with strangers on the internet taught me more than any teacher ever could.
Nuh uh! :p
JK, me too. XD
Also a great way to learn Dvorak. Memorize the key combo to switch between the two depending on how detailed you need to be in telling them they are wrong, but as long as you keep making yourself spend a little more time on the less familiar layout, you’ll eventually become fluent and won’t have to contort your fingers as much regularly to type quickly.
Though typing games can help, too.
I should start out playing Zork with a Dvorak layout.
Zvorak or something
While I can also say IRC, wasn’t anything like proving someone wrong, just keeping up with the speed of the conversation required being able to type without looking at the keyboard.
Yeah, for me it was all AIM chats, though I had a couple friends who used IRC. But if you wanted to be part of the conversation, you better know how to type. You wanna make a quip? Better be quick, because so does everyone else.
Yeah, I feel like Discord (ugh) got that way quick, too, in more populated rooms. IIRC, IRC didn’t have that “quote for context” either, so if you were hunt-and-pecking the conversation already moved on lol.
My parents had me partake in a touch typing course. Only a few years later, after becoming a wbb2 forum mod, did I truly begin to appreciate and practice that skill.
I was too late for IRC, but i was just in time for chat websites. Never was interested in 10-finger-typing, until i discovered online chats. After that, i was one of the fastest in my class.
As my 13yo would say, “why? I can just voice to text”
For when you need to do an assignment due the next day but your roommate keeps yelling at you to shut the fuck up already because they are trying to sleep while you slowly dictate the introduction to your 5 page essay, which then gets you kicked out of your class because you missed removing a few of the "SHUT THE FUCK UP!"s that your voice to text helpfully added for you.
I grew up with a computer in the 80s and for years i would stare at the keyboard while mentally keeping track of what I was typing.
I took keyboarding in middle school and learned to touch type but it took years of practice to break the habits I formed as a child.
Now I’ll be typing something and my husband will walk in so I’ll pause and look over to see what he needs. One time he said “don’t stop on my account” so I started typing again while staring at him.
I can hold a full conversation while doing this but have to slow down to around 60wpm to avoid transcribing the conversation.
They’re not just lines, they’re bumps. Haptic feedback as the kids say.
I was never told, but I always assumed it was to orient yourself without looking, and that’s where the index fingers go when hands are resting on the keyboard.
Yes that’s what they’re for
Smart cookie, you assumed correctly! :)
It was a hard habit to form if you were taught that way, but it does wonders once you learn it.
Tbf, I very rarely type with perfect form like that. Maybe for short bursts when I’m doing an assignment but in like every other case I keep my right hand on the mouse and do any hot keys with just my left hand. Granted thats mainly a gaming thing but also in like GIMP or blender
Blender’s workflow of “One hand never leaves the mouse” is brilliantly underrated. They’ve made the UI more newbie accessible but I always encourage new folks to learn the hotkeys from the start, because you can get SO FAST!!
Something tells me that even if they taught typing, whoever’s asking that question wouldn’t have paid attention in that class anyway.
… or they know perfectly well and this is just another shitty clickbait post to generate engagement.
People look at me like I’m taking crazy pills when I bring up The Typing of the Dead. Literally House of the Dead with a keyboard. You type or you die. It brings that Dark Souls energy to Mavis Beacon’s doorstep.
First played it on my Sega Dreamcast. Probably the only way I could still play now since I don’t have a CRT anymore for light guns.
I tried learning how to type properly but my hand joints have always been shitty so I do what I can. I also grew up PC gaming and that influenced how I type. My boss asked me if I learned to type after I started gaming and I was like “yeah.” And he said, “I can tell”
“Home row?”
Whatever, wasd and mouse is my home row.
Thumb on the spacebar and left pinky pulling double duty between CTRL and Shift! :p
Having a booth for a PC game at conventions used to be difficult because people were not familiar with keyboard and mouse controls. If you weren’t prepared for this you basically had to quickly add controller support somehow and send someone from your team to the next electric store and to buy a bunch of controllers.
Nowadays, though? Game convention visitors these days barely know how to hold a controller. They keep poking at the screens, hoping something happens. It’s a frustrating experience for indie devs sometimes.
So yeah I’m not surprised when people look at keyboards like they’re some kind of ancient slate.
They don’t teach typing anymore. Which is like. Makes zero sense.
I see college kids typing out essays with two index fingers.
No one learns typing unless forced. It’s super boring.
They need to make it mandatory in public schools. Or future generations will be unable to type properly.
I learned it back in like 8th grade or something.
When I was a kid they taught us how to type in school. But they taught everybody how to type wrong: with your hands parallel to each other, instead of wrists straight. I nearly got carpal tunnel syndrome and had to learn how to type a second time!
Split keyboards for the win! Mine and my wife’s Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 is the epitome of “perfect keyboard”. We both dread the day they die since they’re no longer available.
We were taught the same. With a paper over our hands so we couldn’t cheat. My hands naturally moved off home row because it felt awkward to have my wrists bent. I hate the “natural” keyboards but my hands rest like they’re designed
I learned to keep my hands like that thanks to a really weird looking A4Tech ergonomic keyboard, then I realized I could just keep my wrists like that on any keyboard.
I used to have one of those ergonomic keyboards at my last job. Took a week probably to get fully used to (I typed all day). But I recall liking it.
I have small hands but even I feel like most keyboards are cramped. Especially laptop ones.
the egonomic one felt more open and relaxed. But it was wonky to use at first.
Was something like this one.
8th grade? I had typing lessons in 4th!
Really depends on your age. I self-taught with my mom’s typewriter when I was like 8 or 9 and then wasn’t officially taught until 8th grade when computers became more commonplace in schools. Then I had to relearn when I went to school for transcription in my 20s because apparently my 8th grade teacher did a bad job.
Love typing though, my first video game was a typing game on a floppy disk on our windows 97.
As a blind computer user I’m shocked at how many people forget touch typing exists. I learned earlier than most, by necessity, and didn’t have to take the then-mandatory keyboarding classes in middle school.
you’re blind ? using lemmy ? dude please talk more , how ? heck how did you even see the image ?!
Being blind is a spectrum, but even ‘fully’ blind people can use phones and computers with a screen reader.
Alt-text allows people to describe images, OCR can recognise text in images, and now AI can also describe images.
Blind people aren’t helpless, incapable or dependent, like some stereotypes might lead you to believe. Many are able to live relatively normal, independent lives.
Some even play videogames and stream on twitch.But some find constantly being asked the same questions and needing to inform others that they aren’t incapable to be quite annoying. Especially when this sort of info is readily available online.
Screen readers have gotten pretty good. They can use OCR to read text on an image if it’s not too jpeg’d and there’s even some that can describe the image a bit.
Many communities also have rules that you have to add captions to your images.
Blind doesn’t mean they can’t see anything. Just that they have impaired vision.
My mother used to work for the Minnesota State Services for the Blind, so I grew up around a bunch of blind people. Most of them could partially see. They were considered “legally blind.” But they still needed tools to help them “see” better.
That’s what my mother’s job did; they provided access to equipment to assist blind people in their day-to-day lives. Converting books into braille or audio recordings, supplying walking canes, tape decks, and access to other resources to help them out.
They also gave out radios tuned to their own station, and they had a broadcasting studio in the office where employees or volunteers would just read newspapers or magazines for blind people to listen to over the radio.
Granted, my memory of all this was back before the Internet was a thing. I’m sure there are more advanced tools for this modern day and age that help with computer access.
I worked with a guy doing tech support that was blind. It was fascinating. He couldn’t of course see images. He would often ask me what was on the screen so he could help the caller. He used a Braille keyboard. It was awesome. Basically scroll line by line and the keyboard pops up the line enabling him to read it.
That’s super awesome. Your employer was doing a good thing enabling that
Yeah he was a really crazy interesting guy. At one point in time I actually let him drive my car in the parking lot because he said he had never driven a car before and he was always curious about it. Scariest 10 minutes of my life but it was an awesome blast to do that. He actually did pretty good at taking direction except for when we hit a curb because I told him to turn two sharp going around some of the berms.
Touch typing means a whole different thing now lol
