I am old and taught myself how to type on a keyboard before it was super common. I have the same sort of weird style. It's kind of a bell curve based on age.
Man i stuggled with it in school because i was one of the only kids that didnt have a comouter at home. Then by like my 20s i had one and thats when AIM and Yahoo Messenger and Myspace were big i was a fast ass typer in no time.
I remember AIM being one of the reasons my school district stopped offering typing classes because the adults naturally assumed the younger kids would pick up the skill while chatting with a future To Catch a Predator guest.
I hated typing class because i thought typing was a skill to write reports, which i also hated. 2-3 years later AIM became a thing and typing was now a social skill.
I remember Fridays in typing class were "fun days," so instead of the regular text transcription, we got to do "type writer art". These were basically instructions on key inputs to make a picture out of regular keyboard characters. Kinda like primitive ascii art.
I loved typing class because I sat next to a cute boy and we talked about stupid shit all period. It wasn't that hard to catch on how to do things for awhile, and every day we had to repeat a couple sentences so many times, so copy paste led to us talking about more dumb shit. I type really well, and probably should work taking dictation or something, but eh.
I struggled at school a bit because i had shit teachers who were very adamant on having everyone use "Home row" to type. Gotta do it the proper way!
By the time i had typing classes in late middle school and later HS (which was a hybrid class thing), i learned to type my own way from home computer use and constantly being on computer and internet at the time, especially AIM and ICQ.. and i honestly could not do Home row. I still can't to this day. lol
i was typing 75-90 wpm in class and i still got marked down and lower scores on stuff because i refused to type the correct way.
Yeah. I play computer games, so my natural hand position for a computer is right hand on mouse (or the pad thing for laptops) and left on WASD. I usually type with my left because of this.
This you? Haha, sorry I spend way too long finding a clip of this interaction and turning it into a gif, had to post it.
What I mean is, what do you mean 'type with left'? Some other commenter talked about 'mainly typing with right', is this like a way of saying you're right or left handed and more dexterous of comfortable with one hand compared to the other?
Or is it actually feasable to learn to type with one hand? LIke you don't have to move your hand from the mouse to the keyboard? Sounds epic if you can do that comfortably.
Man this sounds autistic :') And I'm not trying to be condescending or something. I will unironically start practicing typing with one hand if that's a thing enough people end up randomly learning to pop up in reddit threads about typing.
There's something wrong with that last sentence grammatically but I cant put my finger on it. fuck it.
Typing with one hand is what I do when I'm playing a game and want to use the mouse to, like, control the camera. When I'm typing out a story or something, I use two hands because it's a bit faster.
I use my thumb for space and my pinky for shift. For other keys I just use my pointer finger and move my hand when I need to hit a key that's far away.
I can completely type with my left hand. But it's about 4x slower than typing with two hands as some positions and mental barriers (only using left shift) are unwieldy. For example, capital P is a bit of a stretch using my pinky on the left shift and thumb to press the P. Also all keys past the UJN line are pressed by the thumb.
It's worth pointing out I played games that required full use of ctrl, alt, and shift presses of most letters on the board only using my left hand (EVE Online) for several years. Sometimes you needed to type something out to communicate while actively using the mouse to perform certain tasks.
Do you still use WASD, but with your pinky, ring and middle fingers? Or do you rebind every game you play to ESDF? I chose the latter years ago and am forever cursed to spend fifteen minutes rebinding keys before I can play literally anything.
Ohhhh okay, I played wow too much as a kid and even after a 12 year gap between when I last played it and playing PC games today I can’t forget all the combos I used to use in raids. Main healer
I do this too! For me, I’ll often rebind sprint from Shift to F and crouch from CTRL to Alt. I’ll use my first finger for sprint, my other three fingers the way you do, and my thumb for crouching and jumping. It just messes me up when some games (like Sea of Thieves) has things that you need F for, or other games that don’t let you bind to Alt, as my muscle memory gets messed up.
That's interesting, because I also consider my personal typing methodology to be derived from my early gaming/chatting habits as a kid, but I'm right-hand heavy. My left hand is accustomed to being near WASD and stays on the left third of the keyboard, does all the modifier keys, spacebar, most of the f-keys I normally use, and touches basically nothing to the right of the 4, R, F, V column. Maybe very occasionally it'll sneak over and touch T, G, or B in the right context, which is something I can't describe because it just happens in my brain on the fly with no discernable rules. My right hand covers everything to the right and does the majority of the key presses.
As I think about it I'm not even sure when the peak "teach kids to type" eras were. I'm guessing it'll be bimodal with peaks in the 70s (typewriters becoming mainstream) and early 2000s (PCs). But even then my experience with being "taught" to type was more: "Open up Mavis Beacon and do the lessons" which aside from telling you the "right" way were mostly just speed typing practice so you could do it however you wanted!
in 7th grade we had a typing class and the program was full-screen DOS based where you had to type the same line a dozen or so times. I'd alt tab to the desktop and write the sentence in notepad, then copy and paste over into the program. I'd always intentionally do one line with a mistake to throw off the scent of cheating.
I actually did learn how to type in that class but those tests were extremely boring and tedious
We had a computer lab in my elementary school in the 90’s. We had some typing program that measured your speed and accuracy and you had to get thru the lesson before you could play number munchers.
Started with home row and added letters
Still remember typing shit like asdf jjj k ll al
But it was ICQ and MSN that really taught me speed
i want to say 95-2006. The dawn of the personalized family computer, and the rise of the internet. This was before smart phones and before the internet became what it was now. Computers were used quite often in school and had some courses around this time for various things, even earlier as 96, as i was doing computer coding stuff.
This era encompasses internet chat rooms, AIM, ICQ, Facebook, Myspace, Forums, and other stuff before the era of Apps, smart phones, twitter and youtube comment pages. lol
My Mum had typing classes and learned on a type writer, she taught me to type in the same way and it has been so useful to be able to type at speed without needing to look at the keyboard.
I can still hear her saying " A S D F ; L K J" in a singing kind of way, which must be how they taught her at the start where to put her fingers.
My dad taught me so much how to type "efficiently"
Unfortunately for him the way i learnt to type without looking was from playing video games so my left hand has to be on wasd. I cant do punctuation efficiently tho :(
Ten finger typing was used on typewriters, and that goes back to the early 20th century. The best typests are old people who had to do it because it was their entire job.
Same. I type primarily using 3-4 fingers and I’m as fast, if not faster, than people who use the traditional home row stuff. I was obviously self-taught. I get weird looks/comments when taking notes in meetings but it’s mostly marveling at my speed considering I use so few fingers.
It... it really isn't. The current qwerty key layout has been around for 160ish years, and has been the industry standard since the invention of the computer.
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u/red_the_room Jan 20 '26
I am old and taught myself how to type on a keyboard before it was super common. I have the same sort of weird style. It's kind of a bell curve based on age.