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Analyzed from 2122 words in the discussion.
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#typing#capslock#commands#type#more#speed#command#amp#sendtext#wpm
Discussion (56 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
; CapsLock + J/K -> ( )
CapsLock & j::SendText "("
CapsLock & k::SendText ")"
; CapsLock + U/I -> [ ]
CapsLock & u::SendText "["
CapsLock & i::SendText "]"
; CapsLock + L/: -> { }
CapsLock & l::SendText "{"
; SC027 = physical ;/: key on a US keyboard
CapsLock & SC027::SendText "}"
; CapsLock + O/P/M/E -> _ + - =
CapsLock & o::SendText "_"
CapsLock & p::SendText "+"
CapsLock & m::SendText "-"
CapsLock & e::SendText "="
Even remapping Cap Lock to Control, which I do, trips me up for a few minutes when I need to work on any other computer that has not been set up that way.
I was using a 106 with US layout
Colleague #1 was using 60% with russian layout
Colleague #2 was on catalan layout
90% of the time we were just hunting for special chars
[1] - https://nmap.org/movies/
[2] - https://blog.doyensec.com/2025/03/04/exploitable-sshd.html
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rkE5I9nFqrI
I suppose knowing what commands to type has precedence over just typing fast.
https://youtu.be/Hy8kmNEo1i8?si=ttPK3z2mp0-5KyW7
60s | Basics category | 79 wpm | 100% acc | 38 cmds | QWERTY | Logitech K200 (membrane keyboard from like 2007)
Fun idea, I like the categories and the option to specify keyboard+layout in the highscore, and the page layout/design is very clear. Thanks for making!
Thank you
Also, another observation I've had is sometimes I just don't feel like speaking, so voice as input to LLMs is really not an ALL time replacement in my personal opinion. In fact, I find myself preferring to type fast and with typos in lowercase much more than anything else.
However as I progressed in my career as a developer what I found is that both my "working" WPM and then my "normal" WPM dropped over time. Once I moved out of truly junior, pure code grinding roles, I spent more and more time thinking, talking to people, etc than I did typing. At that point, what does it matter if I'm at 20wpm or 200?
Likewise, in day to day life, it's not like I'm sitting there typing a novel. I'm mostly clicking buttons, writing short messages, tweet,s and the like. My day to day typing speed has also decreased. I'm sure it's still up around 80-100wpm, but it's rare that I'm sitting there typing long enough to matter.
Same with LLM. Who cares if it takes me 10 seconds or 20 seconds to type in a prompt, when it's going to sit there and spin for a minute anyways?
It's also helpful as a burst speed. It doesn't mean you are always cranking at 120wpm, but you can hit 120wpm when the words in your mental buffer is overloaded and you can empty that fast.
Try writing on pen and paper, you'll find that your mental buffer fills up quickly and you aren't able to hold all of your thoughts, so you have to drop some. It has its use cases, sometimes you have to think more and write less. But in general high entropy write capacity is a valuable spec to have.
One could argue to find the <7s commands in your head takes you more mental power than to just wish it in to the LLM and whilst its running you can wish something else in another session, but I’m thinking that the cost of context is more important than the actual execution time for your task. Every extra task gets more expensive. It’s not a ressource where you have a limit, right from the 2nd task the cognitive load increases.
Therefore I’m thinking one task that can be done in one context window without switching is worth a load in these days of constant distraction.
A lot of times human commands are prone to errors / edge cases as well. Example a simple git pull command usually would take < 7 seconds, but then LLM can take care of resolving merge conflicts etc as well.
A simple git push is usually instant but that comes with an overload of some un intended changes being pushed, which LLMs take care of removing themselves.
When LLM is doing its thing, we can spend the same time in writing the next prompt.
In my experience it can often be the opposite - AI would commit a lot of slop comments and sometimes unnecessary stuff, whereas if you can review things in GitKraken or another program with diffs, things are closer to what you want. Writing commit messages and PR descriptions (maybe change summaries, the intro less so) is easily outsourced to the LLMs though.
Go Bobby!
Why is error in quotes?
Still, I may be a little anal about this but I align with this. I quote everything in bash. In this case I would do single quotes as it's a literal. You never know when someone with lesser bash knowledge will modify your script and put a variable in there. Shell expansions are nothing but footguns everywhere. Proper quoting hygiene and `--` goes a long way
this is what happens when you dont have always on ssh box for your agents
Also for the masochists among us - obfuscated perl, IOCCC style C and Malbolge ;)
50% because by the time you get to this your typing speed has crossed a threshold of no longer being the bottleneck and 50% because you are experienced enough not to make all the silly little mistakes and your unit of work is larger and more complex
The scroll position of the whole page (including the field where I'm typing) changes when you press enter with the first three commands, until until the current command is centered within the commands list
WPM is a strange measure when some words are -h and others are "user@example.com" including the quotes. Not like language doesn't have long and short words but especially with needing shift etc., this feels kinda weird and like it would depend a lot on which words you get randomly assigned. You can pick the longer duration to even that out, but you could also just switch to CPM and get more reliable results faster -- or so I'd expect
The highscores don't show the run's duration, aka the error margin
Theoretically this would have to use readline or whatever input mode the person is used to. Ctrl+P would put the cursor at the end of the previous command, Ctrl+W then erases the last word (until the previous whitespace), Alt+Backspace is similar but erases until the previous punctuation, etc. Not sure if that's all possible on web. For some reason it also didn't bother me though, although I'm a very heavy user of these and e.g. web KVMs and chat input fields (when writing a command to a nerd friend) keep tripping me up. I guess it just feels like a typing test and not "real". But it makes me wonder what "real" would do for typing speed
Going back to the previous command (with (ctrl+)backspace I think mainly) is something I kept trying to do though, also tripping up 3 commands in a row (notice typo -> autopilot-mode fixing it: backspace to undo the enter, type correct character, enter again -> now you have 2 lines wrong). Maybe backspace (or also arrow keys?) being able to go back to a previous command could be a setting so people are free to choose whatever is faster for them
The input field defocuses at the end, so then the default browser commands start triggering as I'm typing the remainder of the command (mostly that's just searching on the page and the scroll jumps to some random spot, but can also be leaving the page with backspace). Maybe the fix can be as simple as restoring the box' previous value onkeyup and coloring it as though it's disabled
Highscores are probably more fun if you see (or can toggle between) the latest submissions as well as the top month/year/all-time. More of a long-term thing, for now I lead one of the categories so I know the submission worked and that I'm amazing *pats self on back* (there is only one other person in that category for now :P)
I wonder how long it takes for everyone to get kicked out by a cheater though. Maybe there should be a cheater category that shows up once you hit >1.5×max(leaderboards), because people will want to try autotyping but you also don't want to give them ideas. Then they have some place to submit to without breaking the other highscores. I know that a lot of cheaters won't care but... I would :shrug:
Choosing e.g. Debian does not include Basic commands that I can tell, whereas of course on Debian it's not like you never mv a file. Maybe multi-selecting categories would enable people to combine it however they want, but then the highscore system is difficult so hm.
To reproduce... actually, I wonder if you can guess my browser and OS family based on the above :D
None of these are a blocker or big bother for me btw, it's just that I saw the invite to report UI issues/ideas and I can't help myself. I had fun using it, thanks for making!
Different durations have different high score lists.
The leaderboard angle is smart too,people love competing on pointless metrics and wpm is the perfect one for that.would love to see a mode for specific tools tho, like a docker-only round or a vim escape sequence speedrun. The git rebase one would genuinely stress test people lol.