You don't have to type faster to type faster

https://blog.abreevy8.io/you-dont-have-to-type-faster-to-type-faster/

by shesmycherrypie • 2 years ago

13 19 2 years ago

blog.abreevy8.io

7thaccount• 2 years ago

I guess you could also get a stenography keyboard and learn.

xmprt• 2 years ago

Related article about using shortcuts to type faster: https://vasilishynkarenka.com/how-to-type-3x-faster/

gnicholas• 2 years ago

I used one of these back in my lawyer days. It was helpful, but manually entering all the shortcuts ate up some time. It would be nice if you could input a document and have it suggest (1) what words you should abbreviate and (2) what would be good abbreviations for those words.

geethree• 2 years ago

That would be fun. Or have a program basically be a key logger and suggest words for you daily or something so it grows the more you use it. Maybe it could have a training mode too to ensure abbreviations don’t fall out of your mind.

eviks2• 2 years ago

The "training" should happen live: log what you type and suggest an abbreviation if you type something that you've added as an abbreviation

willwade3• 2 years ago

This is very quick and hacky but https://github.com/willwade/Abbreviation-Finder

willwade3• 2 years ago

pass a txt file to this: https://abbreviation-finder.streamlit.app

janwillemb• 2 years ago

I tried different keyboard layouts. I discovered that, as a developer, the "secondary keys" are at least as important for speed as the regular ones. Enter, semicolon, quotes, arrow keys, minus, plus, equals. If those were an afterthought in the keyboard layout, this significantly reduces speed and joy.

The author suggests abbreviations. I think it depends on the content of your typing how you can improve speed.

Brajeshwar• 2 years ago

If you are already using Alfred[1] (with PowerPack), then snippets are your friend. Combine this with macOS's own Text Replacement[2], can cover most needs. You add up your snippets as you go along and sync/backup it so you won't have to re-do on each install/upgrade.

I also found out that it is easier to use "," as a deliminator as there is no way I will type a normal English word with a comma then a character but there are lots of "." (period) and then words (most file extension names).

I used TextExpander[3] for a very long time until they decided to move to a subscription model.

1. https://alfred.app

2. https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/mac-help/mh35735/mac

3. https://textexpander.com

rifty• 2 years ago

If you want a standalone cross platform text expander I currently enjoy using Espanso[1]

1. https://espanso.org/

jraph2• 2 years ago

And it's open source FWIW.

willwade3• 2 years ago

Thats neat. Thanks. I tweaked my little abbreviation maker tool for that. https://abbreviation-finder.streamlit.app

jraph2• 2 years ago

This post is deceptive.

This is just an ad for a proprietary product that lets you define abbreviations system wide, with some story telling to make you like the author. I didn't realize it until the end.

It contains no particular insight, no actual numbers about the time it lets you save are shared and it doesn't present what actual abbreviations you can use to help you type faster. Examples are bad and better covered by native features of your tools.

I'm here for the curiosity, an ad can be fine but it'd better be very insightful. Here, it did the opposite of convincing me.

The main example shows an abbreviation that expands to a full email. You wouldn't do that, your parents would hate you for always sending the exact same mail. And you can "edit as new" for this, any good email client lets you do this if you need something like this.

And the three examples at the end are no better, being better covered by built-in features:

- "/ur" to go to an archived version of Mac Donalds doesn't seem realistic. In any case, Firefox's bar is so efficient that you never need to abbreviate anything there. Type a few characters (or even one!) and relevant stuff from your history pop up. It can be parts of different words appearing in the URL or the page title. No effort is spent setting this up. If you do need a keyword shortcut, you can set it up, which is probably not harder than setting up an external tool, and it can be parameterized.

- the "sign in" example is actually better covered by the "remember me" feature, password managers and the form autocomplete feature of browsers (at your choice). Again, the remember me and the autocomplete features require no set up effort.

- if you need fast code editing, IDEs are incredibly efficient at constantly suggesting you the more relevant stuff as fast as possible thanks to LSP servers and equivalent things analyzing your code and its dependencies. There's no way manual abbreviation will work as good but in cases it would, many code editors let you define keywords that expand and code fragments / snippets that can be parameterized. They also let you define macros which can be a very efficient tool for text editing.

eviks2• 2 years ago

Leopold FC980C keyboard (w/ Topre 45g switches btw), ... Did it really increase my typing speed to any appreciable degree though? Maybe a teensy little bit, but overall, I don't really think so.

Why would you expect it to it has the same dumb old unergonomic layout?

Re textexpanders: good advice, though one of the issues is the lack of good hints helping you seamlessly remember/pick which abbreviation you need to insert some text

cmplxconjugate• 2 years ago

As the saying goes: "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast".

Fannon• 2 years ago

There is one simple trick that helped me a lot with writing code and gives me clearly better ergonomics. Maybe a bit caused by the issue of German keyboard layout not working very well for this purpose.

For Windows devices you can download the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and create your own custom keyboard layouts.

I didn't want to change the German layout per se, but make the special character for programming more accessible and close to each other. Most notably [], {}, <> and `.

So I mapped them to AltGr (right thumb) + ASDFYXW in a way that they are very ergonomic to type. E.g to write {}, I just have to press AltGr + df.

Like the author suggests, I've also setup Autohotkey to save me writing common things, but this is well known and if I had to pick, I'd prefer having that custom keyboard layout over typing expansion.

gnoack• 2 years ago

The things you can make a startup from these days... I just use a one-liner in my ~/.XCompose file...

    <Multi_key> <e> <m> : "My Complicated Name <my.complicated.email@gmail.com>"

(Yes, this works on Wayland too)

SPBS• 2 years ago

On Windows only? Then just download AutoHotKey, good lord. It was made for this (and it's free!). They're called hotstrings and they're a first class citizen in AutoHotKey.

Personally I would not rely on these because the muscle memory would screw me over once I am in an environment without it e.g. on a mobile device.

slowmovintarget• 2 years ago

    M-x consult-head-shake

You don't have to type faster to type faster

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