Typing speed for programmers

Programmers spend more time thinking than typing, so raw speed isn't everything. But typing that needs no attention leaves your attention for the problem. If you have to think about where the curly brace is, that's focus taken away from the code – and in chats, reviews, commit messages and documentation, developers type a lot of plain text too.

Code is full of characters that ordinary typing practice never trains: brackets, braces, quotes, semicolons, operators, underscores and camelCase. Many of them need Shift or, on Turkish and other European layouts, the AltGr key, which makes them much slower than letters.

keyboardfast's results page compares your speed on symbols with your speed on letters. If symbols take you twice as long, that's where the easiest gains are.

Code mode gives you real, idiomatic snippets in eight languages, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Go and Rust. Indentation is typed for you – like a modern editor would – and you press Enter at the end of each line. That way you practise the characters you actually type when coding, not the spaces an editor would insert anyway.

• Learn where every symbol is without looking – especially { } [ ] ( ) < > on your layout.
• Use the correct Shift key: the one on the opposite hand from the key you're pressing.
• Many developers on Turkish keyboards switch to a US layout for coding because brackets don't need AltGr there. Try it if symbols are your bottleneck.
• Practise the patterns of your main language: arrow functions, list comprehensions, error handling.
• Learn your editor's shortcuts for completion, multi-cursor and moving lines – they save more time than any extra WPM.