[9/18/26] WPM

I race now. Not with my feet, or with a car, something much less athletic. It’s typing. Yes, typing fast on my keyboard…

You remember TypeRacer? This was the bee’s knees during computer lab.

This game has $2$ disjoint demographics:

  1. Kids learning how to type.
  2. Adults typing against eachother.

I’m not above smoking kids as well.

The game works like this: every racer gets a paragraph, some quote or book exerpt - you then type it as fast as you can. Five people to a race. First to finish wins. As you can imagine, the only two metrics that matter are speed and accuracy.

\[\text{WPM}= \text{words per minute} \quad, \quad \text{Accuracy}= \frac{\text{mispellings}}{\text{total letters}}\]

What I’m most interested in is increasing my $\text{WPM}$. So far I’ve typed $799$ races (I wanted to do this write-up before crossing $800$), and here are my stats:

I take this seriously. If you’re interested you can download my race data csv. I don’t know why you would. But it’s available.

As you can see, I made just a little progress so far. I was actually switching keyboards (and buying them) throughout. I swear I haven’t drunk any copium. I’ve used:

  1. Logitech Alto Keys - slowest
  2. Logitech MX Keys Mini - kinda fast
  3. Macbook Air keyboard - my fastest

I did not expect the Macbook’s keyboard to give me such an advantage. Pretty much every $\text{WPM} > 100$ race I’ve had was with this keyboard. I guess it really all comes down to size and travel. Size matters, and how you use it.

Ideally I want the Keys Mini to be my best performer. It’s wireless and can connect to any computer. Here is what my current performance looks like with this keyboard:

This is real-time. I got 2nd place at $92 \text{ WPM}$ (currently this is faster than my average).

There are lots of strategies to learn, but so far I have these down:

  1. Touch typing only - no looking at the keyboard
  2. Proper home-row position - optimal finger momements to all keys
  3. Always read $\geq1$ words ahead - know what you will type next
  4. No stuttering at commas and periods - this is a natural time killer

Cya at race $5000$!

Update 10/1/26: I just finished my $1500th$ race. About double since writing. My average has gone up to $87$ WPM! I also feel like I unlocked something recently… I will make number go up :)