first, pick a keyboard layout

QWERTY was probably optimized for transcribing Morse code. There are a lot of other theories floating around, that it slows down typists or at least avoids jamming typewriters, but I find the Morse-code one most credible.

What’s clear is that it wasn’t optimized for comfort. If that doesn’t matter much to you or if you plan to switch between computers often or won’t have the freedom to configure them how you like then QWERTY is solidly good enough.

It’s actually the first layout I learned. But I never found it comfortable, not really, so I switched to Dvorak for high school.

Dvorak is a nice fit for English. Comfortable, fast, lots of alternation between hands (which some people like but it’s not ideal for me).

Then there are several variants of Colemak. I switched from Dvorak to mainstream Colemak when I started writing and programming as hobbies and it has been lovely since.

Don’t panic about making the right or wrong choice. The first layout you learn will take the most time, after that it’s not a ton of work to switch, and you’ll have the confidence that comes from knowing that you’ve already done something once before and that it honestly wasn’t so bad.

it’s more about comfort than speed

Next step is to ignore people bragging about how quickly they can type.

There are games and online leader-boards and such, and if you find those things motivating hecking go for it, enjoy, but I’m sure that would have just demotivated me. Instead, what matters to me is the comfortable feeling of mastery. There’s something magical about putting words on screen without having to pay attention to the individual letters.

so here’s what you do

Take the book or whatever and copy it.

It’s not much more complicated than that. Spend 30–60 minutes a day on this until you feel like you can touch-type.

The only wrinkle is that you should take care to push each key with the correct finger, and you should not look at the keyboard. You don’t have to buy a blank keyboard, but one of the nice things about using a non-standard layout is that it quickly trains you to stop looking down.

Look at something else. I often type while looking out a window or at my outline, or if I’m copying or editing something, that’s when I look at text. Keeping your eyes up is part of what makes this fun.

If you want to make a cheat-sheet of the layout and sometimes look at that, I find it doesn’t hurt things. The only way to screw this up is to look at your fingers.

You don’t even need a reference though. Once you know which keys correspond to which fingers you can just guess — randomly even — until you get it right. Sure you’re gonna be terrible for the first ten hours or so, but then it gets better and better.

It’s kind of like a Souls game, honestly. And not even as hard as one.

I know this advice boils down to “stop being bad” but sometimes all that’s needed to motivate getting good is knowing that, yes, if you put in the time you will get good.

and then…​

Having a keyboard layout memorized, so that you can just type without thinking or looking, is a required first step for switching to a mouse-free user-interface or modal text editor.

But you don’t need to jump to those. I would recomend practicing writing or coding next. Learn to make things, then you can play more with the tools you use to make them.