FOSSPicks
Typing tutor
KTouch
Keyboardio is a wonderful, paradigm-shifting, ergonomic keyboard that was successfully crowdfunded two and a half years ago. As the video that accompanied the original campaign proclaimed when discussing making such a keyboard, "How hard can it be?" But it ended up being very hard. During those years, Kaia Dekker and Jesse Vincent have provided a compelling book's worth of excellent updates, flew to China more times than I can remember, and produced endless prototypes, as well as their own offspring! Years after the idea took shape and was subsequently funded, the wooden keyboards are finally making their way to hacker households. Which creates a new problem: How do you relearn to type on a keyboard with vertically aligned keys, no cursor control, two butterfly shaped keybeds, and a vastly different layout? You go back to basics.
KTouch is a brilliant tool that teaches you the basics of touch typing through a series of tutorials that unlock in stages as you improve. Unlike the many websites that hope to do the same, KTouch is very responsive and features a more game-like user interface. Speed dials show characters per minute and accuracy, for example, and the main view itself adapts to the keys being focused on. You start typing simple left-hand/right-hand combinations, such as fj f f j j, which are repeated, reflected, and isolated to the point at which it hopefully becomes muscle memory before moving on to more complex typing. It works brilliantly. Even if you type for a living, spending a few minutes a day will improve your speed, accuracy, and posture. It's also essential when learning how to use a weird wooden keyboard delivered at great cost several years after the original order.
Project Website
https://www.kde.org/applications/education/ktouch
Music downloader
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)