The productivity you can achieve on Linux is unparalleled to other operating systems when used appropriately. The keyboard is perhaps the most used input device on your Linux machine. This provides you with a large scope to further enhance your productivity with touch typing.
Most of the tasks that you perform with your mouse or trackpad can be done much faster using the keyboard with the help of some keyboard shortcuts and touch typing. Want to give it a try yourself? This article will help you in getting started.
What Is Touch Typing?
Touch typing is a technique that helps you to type faster by placing your fingers on specific parts of the keyboard and hit the keys without looking at the keyboard. This is especially useful if you have a job that involves typing a lot, such as an author or programmer.
With touch typing, you can minimize the key travel and type more efficiently without moving your fingers a lot. Each finger will be responsible for a specific set of nearest keys on the keyboard. Touch typing is great for increasing your typing speed as well as accuracy.
If you’re not convinced yet, here are some more reasons why you should give touch typing a try:
- Decreases finger fatigue since all the keys are nearby
- Improved accuracy as the muscle memory develops
- Better posture since you don’t have to look at the keyboard
- Faster error correction
- Easy to learn and doesn’t cost anything
An Introduction to KTouch
Just like any other skill, practice is essential to gain mastery over touch typing, and KTouch does just that. KTouch is a Linux application developed by The KDE Education Project to help you learn and practice touch typing. This nifty application provides text to train and gradually adjusts the difficulty depending on your progress.
KTouch displays the keyboard on the screen and indicates which key to press next and which is the correct finger to use. With enough practice, you’ll learn to type with all your fingers without having to look at the keyboard.
It also supports courses in multiple languages and also has a course editor that you can tweak as per your needs. KTouch supports different keyboard layouts and you can even create new user-defined layouts for yourself.
How to Install KTouch on Linux
If you’re running Ubuntu, Debian, or any of its derivatives, you can install KTouch using the following command:
sudo apt-get install ktouchHowever, it is also available as a Snap package and as a Flatpak package for other distributions. Depending on your preference, you can run either of the two commands given below to install KTouch.
To install the KTouch Snap package:
sudo snap install ktouchInstalling the KTouch Flatpak package is easy as well:
flatpak install flathub org.kde.ktouchExploring KTouch and Its Features
Once the installation completes, you can open up KTouch just like you would open any other application. The application has a short and simple onboarding process that asks you to introduce yourself and your prior typing experience. The application will automatically unlock lessons as per your experience.
The app organizes lessons as per the alphabet used in them. You can start a lesson by double-clicking on any of them. You can also create your own lessons to practice custom words or phrases.
Each lesson lasts for a few minutes and presents you with different combinations of keys you’ve already practiced with. At the end of each lesson, KTouch presents you with a progress report and a status displaying either passed or failed.
KTouch smartly analyzes your common mistakes and increases the frequency of such keys to provide you with more practice and build muscle memory.
Practice Makes Perfect
If you’ve been putting off learning and practicing touch typing, KTouch is a convincing tool to help you get back on track. All you need to do is invest a few minutes consistently for a few weeks, and you’ll start to notice the difference in your typing speed and accuracy.
It can also help you develop your thoughts faster and positively impacts your creative process. Running short on disk space or want a typing tutor that can run on all devices? Check out these five websites that can also help you reach the typing speed you’ve always wanted.