geekhack

geekhack Community => Keyboards => Topic started by: DroopySWE on Wed, 15 December 2010, 21:42:03

Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: DroopySWE on Wed, 15 December 2010, 21:42:03: I'm hiting 440-450 characters/minute doing the 10-fast-fingers.com speedtest using a $15 crappy logitech usb keyboard . Is that good or bad?

Where numbers are you guys hitting using regular crappy keyboards versus using cherry mx boards?
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: NAVIWORLDINC on Wed, 15 December 2010, 22:15:29: I don't know man, Characters per minute doesn't really sound like an accurate portrayal of how fast someone can type.

(http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitpic/photos/full/208823074.png?AWSAccessKeyId=0ZRYP5X5F6FSMBCCSE82&Expires=1292474165&Signature=6TESyxB6WvC9%2BtZwXd7AxBWDTeg%3D)
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: DroopySWE on Wed, 15 December 2010, 22:25:28: Quote from: NAVIWORLDINC;263796
I don't know man, Characters per minute doesn't really sound like an accurate portrayal of how fast someone can type.

Show Image
(http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitpic/photos/full/208823074.png?AWSAccessKeyId=0ZRYP5X5F6FSMBCCSE82&Expires=1292474165&Signature=6TESyxB6WvC9%2BtZwXd7AxBWDTeg%3D)

Really? To me characters says everything since words have different amount of characters.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: theferenc on Wed, 15 December 2010, 22:30:29: I think he was making a joke...notice he didn't get anything right?
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: Crypt on Wed, 15 December 2010, 22:32:05: I don't think this belongs in "keyboards" but I'll put in my 2c just for fun...

Assuming everyone is trying to use textbook typing technique:

25wpm = starting to get the hang of it

50wpm = proficient for a light user

85+wpm = what I would expect for a heavy user.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: turbocharged on Wed, 15 December 2010, 22:44:12: I don't like that 10 fast fingers test...it's just random words. I think sentences are a much better representation of typing speed. I did 394 on that test.

I like doing typeracer because it is difficult sentences with a lot of capitalization and punctuation. I'm not an incredible typist...I average around 75 wpm which I feel is good enough for me.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: WhiteRice on Wed, 15 December 2010, 22:48:20: Dude we should have a for fun typeracer tournament.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: Broncosoozie on Wed, 15 December 2010, 22:48:47: My results with my Das MX Cherry Blues:

Code: [Select]
You reached 476 points, so you achieved position 1568 of 737179 on the ranking list You type 608 characters per minute You have 111 correct words and you have 0 wrong words

My results with the actual keyboard on the laptop:

Code: [Select]
You reached 421 points, so you achieved position 5296 of 737266 on the ranking list You type 567 characters per minute You have 103 correct words and you have 1 wrong words
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: WhiteRice on Wed, 15 December 2010, 22:51:37: Does anyone want to typerace? Just for fun :D

http://play.typeracer.com/?rt=trwhiterice
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: squarebox on Wed, 15 December 2010, 23:51:54: Below 30wpm... :(
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: epik on Thu, 16 December 2010, 00:19:34: 120 words
Typing Speed Test

On a Logitech G15 3rd attempt. Will have another go when the blackwidow blue switch board arrives.

yay geek pride.

well that didn't work.

You reached 501 points, so you achieved position 933 of 740755 on the ranking list

You type 624 characters per minute
You have 120 correct words and
you have 0 wrong words

120wpm
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: LaneWeaver on Thu, 16 December 2010, 00:28:59: The test has absolutely no punctuation and very few upper-case letters. It's a good enough measure for something like instant messaging. For real-world testing (for example, writing an essay), Typeracer is a much better "benchmark" since it includes a lot of punctuation and capitalization. That makes Typeracer much more "complete" as a test.

Oh, and I hit 550.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: nocturn4l3030 on Thu, 16 December 2010, 00:29:21: Quote from: squarebox;263825
Below 30wpm... :(

below 30??? i shall burn you a copy of mavis beacon ;D
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: intealls on Thu, 16 December 2010, 09:08:28: The 10-fast-fingers test is seriously flawed, it adds each and every keystroke to the characters per minute var. If you type 100 characters and correct half of them, you will get a chars per min value of 200 (it counts backspaces as entered characters as well). You can verify this by typing the first word that appears, erase it, retype it and let the counter time out.

The words per minute is generally regarded as the number of correctly entered characters divided by 5 (including whitespaces), 10-fast-fingers just returns the number of correctly typed words. That is, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis will count as one word, when it really should count as 9.

If you don't like Typeracer for whatever reason, http://speedtest.aoeu.nl (http://speedtest.aoeu.nl) is a much better alternative than 10ff.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: godly_music on Thu, 16 December 2010, 11:03:33: Typing speed isn't in- or decreased by the switch you use, or whether you use mechanicals or rubber domes. I think the merits of mechanical keyboards are largely exagerrated - it's just a feel thing.

In happy news, I got

"Your speed was: 87wpm.

Congratulations! You made no mistakes, practice does make perfect."

on http://www.typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed.php. Let's not talk about how much I sucked using the OPs link.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: theferenc on Thu, 16 December 2010, 11:13:27: Well, I wouldn't say it's of such low importance. I know I have fewer mistypes on my BS keyboards, relative to my rubber domes (same layout). Plus, since you don't have to depress the key the whole way (typically 2mm vs 4mm), if you train yourself to not bottom out, you can type quite a bit faster.

The 4mm figure is from a standard rubber dome. Low profile scissor switches typically have a 2mm travel as well. But feel like slimy mush...
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: Crypt on Thu, 16 December 2010, 11:26:36: 10 fast fingers must've reset their rankings or something. About two years ago, I got 120WPM and only ranked 2471, interesting.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: DroopySWE on Fri, 17 December 2010, 20:18:35: I just hit 468. Woho! Anyone think I could hit 500 if I had a mechanical keyboard?
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: DroopySWE on Fri, 17 December 2010, 21:04:23: I'm buying a Filco next week :)

I'm getting a regular 105 majestouch. But I'll replace it for a tenkeyless version when the swedish layout once it gets into stock :)
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: DroopySWE on Tue, 21 December 2010, 07:49:21: Just hit 475!

I'm hoping I'll hit 500 once I get my filco.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: keyb_gr on Tue, 21 December 2010, 16:12:19: Quote from: ripster;266693
Whatever happened to the industry standard, WPM? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute)

Dunno. Over here CPM would be a fairly common measure of Morse code speed, and as such probably has been for a few decades.

Recently went back to the M after a long period of G80/blues usage, and now I'm making more typos - what's up with that?

In the end, typing speed only needs to be high enough, which rarely means more than 50 wpm or thereabouts for most applications. Once you're over that, what you type is more important than speed - there are plenty of people around who can hit the 100 wpm vicinity but produce output that quite frankly reads like gibberish (presumably due to training largely consisting of instant messaging where you can get away with most anything).
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: woody on Tue, 21 December 2010, 16:50:07: Quote from: keyb_gr;266869
In the end, typing speed only needs to be high enough

Seconded. My gripe is that I can't really think that fast.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: patrickgeekhack on Tue, 21 December 2010, 19:37:07: Quote from: turbocharged;263810
I don't like that 10 fast fingers test...it's just random words. I think sentences are a much better representation of typing speed. I did 394 on that test.

I like doing typeracer because it is difficult sentences with a lot of capitalization and punctuation. I'm not an incredible typist...I average around 75 wpm which I feel is good enough for me.

I like 10 fast fingers mainly because it just generate a random list of words. I learned to type "without thinking" on this site. Before, I was good at typing while looking at what I was typing on the screen. But when it came to copying a text, I was very very bad. Now, it's much much better. Typeracer is good for typing "real life" text. There is capital letters and punctuations.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: patrickgeekhack on Tue, 21 December 2010, 19:39:28: Quote from: keyb_gr;266869

In the end, typing speed only needs to be high enough, which rarely means more than 50 wpm or thereabouts for most applications. Once you're over that, what you type is more important than speed - there are plenty of people around who can hit the 100 wpm vicinity but produce output that quite frankly reads like gibberish (presumably due to training largely consisting of instant messaging where you can get away with most anything).

True. Personally, I think a typing speed of 70-80 WPM (without typos) is more than enough for everyday usage. A friend of mine made me realise that it's more important to find a good rythm that having rapid acceleration. In the long run, finding a good rythm is probably better for delaying RSI.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: patrickgeekhack on Tue, 21 December 2010, 19:48:48: This guy is good too:
(http://media.lunch.com/d/d7/205118.jpg?3)
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: Tony on Fri, 14 January 2011, 01:20:13: I got 49wpm (245 chars per minute) in Colemak (http://Colemak.com) layout.
(http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/9264/colemak2.jpg)

I think it is good enough, although for fun I try to get to 60wpm with Typeracer. (http://Typeracer.com)

Playing Typing of the Dead or Typer Shark (http://www.mediafire.com/?3iytml19xm9) also makes the training fun and exciting.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: chimera15 on Fri, 14 January 2011, 07:22:07: This was discussed in other topics. Most of the fastest typists in the world use rubber domes. It's mainly because at that speed it's difficult to control where you bottom out and rubber domes provide a softer landing and more spring for the fingers is my theory.

All in all the keyboard doesn't make that much difference though. Mechanicals can tend to make the average 50-60wpm typist probably 10-20wpm faster. At 100+, let alone 150+ it really makes almost no difference at all, maybe at most 5-10wpm.

Feel and speed don't always equate. Mechanicals feel better at lower speeds, but at 100+ tend to become rather harsh on the fingers in most cases.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: NimbleRabit on Fri, 14 January 2011, 07:59:51: Quote from: chimera15;278419
This was discussed in other topics. Most of the fastest typists in the world use rubber domes. It's mainly because at that speed it's difficult to control where you bottom out and rubber domes provide a softer landing and more spring for the fingers is my theory.

All in all the keyboard doesn't make that much difference though. Mechanicals can tend to make the average 50-60wpm typist probably 10-20wpm faster. At 100+, let alone 150+ it really makes almost no difference at all, maybe at most 5-10wpm.

Feel and speed don't always equate. Mechanicals feel better at lower speeds, but at 100+ tend to become rather harsh on the fingers in most cases.

This has been true in my experience with mechanicals so far. When I'm typing casually and not bottoming out I find my mechanical to be a complete joy to type on, and it feels fantastic. It doesn't make me faster, it just feels great to type on and is very easy on my hands since I'm not bottoming out. When I do tests like this (657 characters per minute on this one), I don't think typing on a mechanical increases my speed at all, and even the comfort level isn't very high because I can't type without bottoming out at those speeds.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: Setiawan on Fri, 14 January 2011, 08:04:56: Quote
Your score: 571 CPM (that is 114 WPM)

Your score beats or equals 99.30% of all!

From http://speedtest.aoeu.nl/ :)

I'm using rubber dome right now. Never touched a mechanical keyboard before, but I too don't think it'd make much more of a difference. At those speeds, my reaction time is what's limiting any more potential.

Regardless, I am gonna get my hands on a mechanical keyboard. Just because I'm not gonna get any faster, doesn't mean it can't be more fun ;D
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: bigpook on Fri, 14 January 2011, 08:48:29: I will take comfort over speed. Having said that, I think I type faster on the HHKB versus the BS. I really like both of them though, wouldn't be able to pick one over the other.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: Co-Op on Fri, 14 January 2011, 08:52:38: I also find it's simply a matter of comfort, and with a mechanical keyboard (BS/Cherry blues in particular), the experience is simply more pleasurable as there is more feedback.

/me likes how the click-clack-thonk-bang-boom of the keys sounds like machine gun fire when typing over 100 wpm's.
Title: Decent typing speed?
Post by: NimbleRabit on Fri, 14 January 2011, 18:55:42: Decided to try this again after getting home, when I wasn't so tired in the morning.

Quote
You reached 498 points, so you achieved position 700 of 682029 on the ranking list

You type 670 characters per minute
You have 123 correct words and
you have 3 wrong words

This is sorta fun, I did a few more and managed to break top 500 on position which is pretty neat.

Quote
You reached 518 points, so you achieved position 444 of 711728 on the ranking list

You type 695 characters per minute
You have 125 correct words and
you have 2 wrong words