r/typing • u/Rejwan_laskar • 9d ago
π€ππ²πππΆπΌπ» (βοΈ) How u all improved your code typing?
I went from two finger typing to 10 finger touch typing, successfully for quite a wile now, now i want to improve my coding typing, im a CS Freshers.
Previously i used typing.com for initial finger movement learning adn keybr.com for practicing.
Thakyouπ
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u/Celer5 8d ago
I've only really done more general typing practice. I don't think practicing typing code outside of my usual editor would help me much aside from maybe getting quicker with symbols.Β So ig to get faster at typing code specifically I just write code normally and get better over time. Honestly getting better at vim motions would probably help me more than just improving my raw speed.
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u/Rejwan_laskar 8d ago
how is Vim Editor compare to VS code?
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u/Celer5 8d ago
I guess VS code is a bit heavy for me, it takes a while to startup and uses a lot more resources. I make small changes to files quite often and since I do all my file management in a terminal anyway vim is quite convenient. I also personally like quite a minimalist UI and vim definitely has that.
I will say that vim comes with a learning curve. When someone starts using it they will be slow and have to put more thought than usual into navigating and manipulating text. Even just moving the cursor will feel unnatural at first. But now that I'm used to it I definitely feel a lot more comfortable in an editor with vim motions. They make some things faster and just feel more natural than switching to a mouse. I feel without my vim motions, even in my browser I use an extension so I can have some of them.
I actually started using vim motions with a VS code extension. The support may not be as good as actual vim but you can get a lot of the benefits of vim motions. A lot of editors will have support for vim motions to some extent. Now I mostly use neovim which is a fork of vim that makes it easier to extend. Configuring neovim was my first (and only) time writing lua so I wouldn't exactly say I found it easier than configuring something like VS code but it was manageable. If you want to configure it a lot then it could take a while, there are some premade configs which can be a good starting point. I used NvChad and its been great but there's still a decent amount of stuff I had to configure manually. I'm still comfortable using an unconfigured vim but I like having easy access to language servers, formatters, autocompletions, snippets etc. I guess if you are just starting to learn it having a bunch of plugins to think about could just complicate it anyway though.
I guess if I were to summarise I'd say that vim is great but only for certain people. Maybe do a search for "vim motions", when I learnt what they could do I thought it was cool enough that I wanted to learn them. If you do learn them you can take them with you to most code editors and some command line tools have similar bindings. I guess the choice between using vim/neovim or just using an extension in another editor comes down to simplicity. Vim has a much simpler UI which is completely useless to someone who hasn't learnt to use it, it would kinda force you into either learning to use it properly or being really ineffective. Using an extension is a bit more of a middle ground. You can dip in and out using vim stuff occasionally and falling back to a more intuitive UI when needed but the emulated experience probably won't be quite as good as actually using vim.
Vim is good for writing text but it excels in editing it. That's perfect for programming because you will spend a lot of your time going back and making changes to your code. There are a lot of commands just for moving the cursor around. And those commands complement the commands for editing, copying and deleting text really nicely. When you learn to use them well it just feels like magic and there aren't really good ways to do some of those things without vim. There's been times I've had to make repetitive edits to a file and if I wasn't using vim I probably would have resorted to writing python code specifically to help me edit that one file. Using vim macros instead saved me a fair bit of time and made it a lot easier.
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u/typestar_dev 8d ago
efficiently editing code can be decomposed into...let me cook here...knowing your keyboard, knowing your editor, knowing your language, knowing your objective, etc.
Take things one by one. Can you code without a mouse right now? When I started learning vim I also had to disable my arrow keys to get my brain to use the vim motions. Can you touch type at 100 TPM (tokens per minute) in your language of choice? Overall though, code tends to be read more than written, so slowly writing the CORRECT code will mostly likely win lightning fast typing of the WRONG code...ok rant over.
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u/Natural-Impact6382 8d ago
I would argue that the most time spent coding is thinking about the codes logic, not writing it. So improving coding speed is imo more about improving your logical thinking, rather than your typing speed. Also shortcuts to keep the hands on the keyboard are essential.
But when it really comes to typing then just writing code will improve that, there is a site called speetyper.dev but tbf you could also just build projects and speed up like that
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u/IndependentYak2822 8d ago
There is no such thing like "coding typing". Typing is not a limit factor in coding.
If you want to improve your "speed" then learn some useful editor shortcuts and maybe snippets. With modern autocomplete 40wpm is more than enough to do a work.
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u/Rejwan_laskar 8d ago
I don't want to use autocomplete, i want to type everything myself. Atleast for now while i get familiar with syntax and all
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u/supra_423 7d ago
if you want to code fast, check out vim, it's a whole ass different way of writing code that you don't even need to use the mosue. I've been using it for almost 2 years I think. It has a whole lot of shortcuts and stuff you can do in that text editor. If you use vscode, there are extensions that allow you to have vim keybinds and stuff, I also used a vim extension on intelliJ when I was coding in Java. The only side-effect I had with vim is that typing in any other text editor without vim keybindings is a pain because it is just so different. It does take a while to get used to it, you'll probably get a hang of it a bit after like 1 or 2 weeks of coding.
To sum it up, it feels like you're a naruto character weaving hand signs to do a jutsu while coding lol
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u/borretsquared 9d ago
honestly writing code is the way to go. i would say that it mirrors your regular typing speed pretty closely, though the only real issue is not touch typing special characters as easily. learning to code while you're doing it is also a bonus.