I
spent a month using a free open-source touch typing package
to up my speed and
improve my typing skills. Klavaro is a plain, no-nonsense but effective program that allows you to
learn to type even if it's your first time using a keyboard. Although
over the last month I've seen my typing speed increase, I noticed a
few issues along the way.
I'd
previously learned the beginnings of typing on a package called Mavis
Beacon. This was more visual, designed to look like a classroom, with
a female animated teacher talking you through the basic keys. Between
the lessons, colourful games required you to hit certain keys within
certain times to get points. Mavis Beacon offered a visual
representation of your fingers on the keyboard, and showed you where
you should move your fingers to. Each key would light up as you hit
it.
It
was fun, but I didn't commit to it properly at the time. This was 4
years ago, before I swapped from Mac to PC. Mavis Beacon was a
paid-for product; Klavaro is free from Sourceforge.
Klavaro
is much more curt. There is no speech guidance- only the printed text
for instruction. There's also very little indication of which fingers
to use for which keys- instructions for the home keys are there, but
after that you're guessing. There's no on-screen keyboard during the
exercises,
After
learning the home keys (asdf jkl;) the lessons move on to the keys
above before incorporating the two rows. When using keys like qwer,
the temptation is to rest your fingers on that row and not keep them
on the home keys and reach up with each one. There's no instruction
not to do that, though, nor encouragement to keep the fingers in the
proper place.
I
found some trouble distinguishing upper-case I from lower-case l, and
the number 1. You may want to change the font from the default
setting. You can also add bold and italics to some of the fonts,
should you desire.
A
font change, however, won't necessarily help you find the more
obscure keys. When incorporating the symbols, you will eventually be
asked to press the vertical bar. It looks like this:
|
Wikipedia
says it has something to do with maths.
That rules me out of using it for anything other than getting through
Klavaro's lessons...
This
is also difficult, on-screen, to distinguish between I, l and 1. It
took AGES to find. The position, on my keyboard, of the vertical bar
is shift and the key directly left of z.
Other
problems: The colour scheme is a little hard on the eye, especially
for the 1 in 5 of us like myself who are partially colour blind.
Yellow-on-green is a strain.
These
are nitpicking issues I felt compelled to make a note of for the
purpose of blogging later. By the end of the month, I found I could
type faster and without constantly looking at every key. I've still
got a long way to go, and I'm still making errors, but I type a lot
in work so I have plenty of opportunity to see the results of the
practice.
I
know I said I'd do this for a month, but there's no point stopping
now. I'm just getting the knack. I'll sneak a few lessons in over the
Christmas period and see what the rest of the package has to offer.
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