home typing

A number of my regular exercise involve typing in some way or other. For one thing, I sometimes practise it as a sitting and moving meditation. I can go very slowly, focusing on things like posture and relaxation for every character. Then choreographing words, I can pre-flight a word or sequence in my head, feeling out exactly where my hands will go, before typing. Then, when doing that, I aim to have each finger in position as soon as possible, identifying those times when I neglected to move a finger early. In time, this drills the brain in patterns to produce common sequences of characters. In focusing in this detail, it becomes an exercise in thinking and awareness. Moreover, I tend to break things into lines, and use a typing practice web app I wrote a while back. That app is built into this wiki, so pressing Ctrl-Alt-Shift-t opens the Markdown source of the page in the practice program. (The idea here was that I could accumulate practice texts in this same Wiki I use for both writing content for the web and for storing personal notes on things.)

When making a moving meditation out of typing a text, it can help if it is of a spiritual nature. Especially if you are going to repeat the same few lines over and over again. Sometimes I copy-type books, sometimes fiction for example. It forces you to read carefully, to know every word, and every character of every word, and locks distractions out of your mind. When memorising spiritual texts, such as the Bible or the verse of the Dhammapada, I utilise typing as part of the process. When practising, I read a line (if not already in memory), and then aim to type the entire line from memory. The residual memory from this process then makes subsequent memorisation of that text an easier exercise. In this way, for example, I have memorised the prologue of John, the Sermon on the Mount, the Dhammapada, Psalm 51, and I'm now working on other passages from the Gospels.

Sample Texts

To give you some examples (where you can press A-C-S-t to see the typing practice programme) I've take some things from a variety of sources. Some poetry, some Christian, some Buddhist. All these were taken from the Gutenberg Project.

• The first verse of Isabella by Keats[1]
• The Beatitudes, WEB translation[2]
• Dhammapada, verses 1-5, Muller trans.[3]

Or to auto open in typing mode (append ?action=typing to the url)

• The first verse of Isabella by Keats[4]
• The Beatitudes, WEB translation[5]
• Dhammapada, verses 1-5, Muller trans.[6]

Brief Instructions

Having wrote this app primarly for my own use, I have neglected the matter of writing any instructions. Here are a few things:

• Pressing Alt-# for some number # makes each line repeat that number of times.
• In repeated line mode, CSS changes indicate if you are at the start of a group of identical lines.
• Pressing space at the start of a line doesn't constitute an error.
• The general aim is simply to press one correct character after another.
• It indicates errors in both a pop up box and the sequence of characters at the bottom.
• It indicates the number of errors on each line.
• It has a restart-line mode, where if you make an error on a line, when done, it goes back to the start of that line rather than advancing.
• Pressing escape restarts a line.
• Pressing enter advances a line.
• Cursor keys move the cursor.
• To run this with an arbitrary text, go to the (very) rough and ready site here. Note that Gemini wrote the frontpage you see, but I wrote the entirety of the actual app. (I'm not a professional software engineer which is why the code is a mess.) In addition, if you download this zip file, then edit the body content of the .html file with your practice text, that works too.