Typing - Quick history and learning tools

History of my keyboard layouts

• I started with QWERTZ (the german version of QWERTY) because that was what it was.
• I learned about Neo2¹ at university and it went downhill from there.
  • I started researching about different keyboard layouts.
  • I found out that Neo is quite nice and started learning Neo2.
• From there on, I continued thinking about different forms of text input and stuff. I got my hands on a Tap strap² which is another form of text input again. I may discuss that some time, let’s see.
• Within my research I learned about further derivatives of Neo - I believe that Neo was kind of a starting point for a large (german) community. There are loads of different derivatives, all better in some ways.
• In my personal opinion, from Neo onwards, there are mostly philosophical questions about what is better and what is worse; there does not really exist a final answer to that.
• One derivative I got stuck on is called KOY or K.O,Y³. That’s my current Go-To which I will stick to - at least, for now. I will not make any promises for the future.
• Since then, I got set on KOY and am quite happy with it. So I started to optimize into another direction.
• I bought myself a Moonlander, in black and starting with Kalih Box White Switches. Loved the concept, changed the switches to Cherry Red pretty soon.
• Finally, I also got hands on a Planck with Cherry MX Silent Red switches. I am using that while being in calls (the Moonlander is too loud for that) and when not at home (mainly at work).

Well, this was the short (…) history. I would like to link two talks I have given to the topic (in german): The first one about Neo and the second one about KOY. In the second one, I also discuss my journey when learning it - which I monitored very closely.

Resources I have used

Now to the main idea of this article: This should be a small reference of things I have used for typing.

• Key Hero: I love this website until today. It supports a lot of languages and for every language, you have quotes and stuff that you can type to get better.
  This is my current Go-To tool for training typing. I also have found the instant death mode quite interesting: You failed as soon as you have one error in you typing. This forces you to focus on correctness instead of speed - and in my opinion, I have strongly increased my speed by getting more precise in typing. You would never think how much time gets lost when correcting errors.
• Tipp10: Another website for learning typing. I have used that for Neo very much. Sadly, there is no support for KOY.
• KTouch: The (Linux) KDE application for learning typing. I used that to learn KOY.
  You require lessions for your layout and KOY is not one of the pre-defined lessions, but I was lucky and found a guy who had the same project as I did and who also generated some lessions that were just importable in KTouch.

Conclusion

Start typing with a different layout. It is fun, it is far more ergonomic and it is wonderful to talk about with other people because it is really niche.

Another thing: Take notes on how well you were on your old layout, how you proceeded learning the new one and how long it took you. I did not do that when learning Neo but I did that when learning KOY and I loved it - also now, I love thinking back to it. I still try to beat my high scores - but most of the time, I am unable to do that any more.