Home row keys

Where each finger rests, why F and J have bumps, and practice words you can type on the home row alone.

Start lesson 1: F and J

Run a fingertip along the middle row of letters on your keyboard and you will find two small ridges, on F and J. They are there so your index fingers can find the home row without looking, and everything in touch typing is measured from that row.

It is a stranger place than it looks. On a standard QWERTY keyboard the home row holds only one vowel, and only about a third of the letters you type. Here is what the home row is for, where each finger rests, how it differs on other keyboards and how to practise it, with real words you can type on those nine letter keys alone.

What the home row is

The home row is the middle row of letter keys. On a US QWERTY keyboard it reads A S D F G H J K L ; ' and then Enter. Eight of those are home keys, where your fingers rest between key presses:

G and H are on the home row, but no finger rests on them. Your index fingers slide across to press them and come straight back. The ' key at the end of the row belongs to the right little finger, a short stretch beyond ;.

"Home" is meant literally. It is where your fingers live: the place each one leaves to press a key and returns to straight afterwards. Reach up for E, come back to D. Reach down for M, come back to J. Do that a few hundred thousand times and it stops being something you think about.

Why typing is organised around it

With your fingers on the middle row, every letter key is at most one row away. Rest them on the top row instead and the bottom row would be two rows down; rest them on the bottom row and the top would be two rows up. The middle gives the shortest reaches overall.

It also gives each finger a fixed starting point, which matters more than it sounds. If your hand always starts from the same place, pressing E is always the same small movement: up and slightly left from D. Repeat it often enough and the finger knows the way on its own. If your hand starts from somewhere different each time, the movement changes each time, and your eyes have to help. When researchers at Aalto University filmed 30 typists with motion capture in 2016, the fast typists had this in common whatever their style: they kept their hands in one position and moved only their fingers, and they used the same finger for each key every time.

And it gives your hands somewhere to rest. Fingers resting lightly on their home keys stay relaxed and ready. Fingers held in the air tire, and they drift.

A row with only one vowel

Look along the QWERTY home row again: A S D F G H J K L. The only vowel is A. E, I, O and U are all on the top row, along with R and T, two of the most common consonants in English.

To see what that means in practice, count the letters in ten classic English novels from Project Gutenberg, a little over five million letters, and sort them by the row they are typed on. About 51% of the letters are on QWERTY's top row, 15% on the bottom row and only 34% on the home row. Spaces, punctuation and Shift are left out; the space bar is a thumb key on every layout.

The same count shows what alternative layouts were designed to do:

Dvorak and Colemak move the most common letters onto the home row, so your fingers spend about twice as much of their time at home. Whether that makes anyone faster is a separate and much-argued question, covered in QWERTY vs Dvorak vs Colemak.

For a QWERTY typist the lesson is practical. Since two letters in three need a reach, the reaches have to be clean and the return home has to be automatic. That is what home row practice is really training.

The bumps on F and J

The two ridges let you find home by touch. Put your index fingers on them and the rest of your fingers line up on their own: middle, ring and little fingers settle onto D, S and A on the left and K, L and ; on the right. No looking needed, which is the whole idea of touch typing.

They are on F and J rather than on A and ; because the index fingers anchor the hands. They are your strongest and most agile fingers and they cover the most keys, two columns each, so if they are in the right place everything else follows. The number pad uses the same idea: its 5 key, where your middle finger rests, has a bump of its own (see 10-key typing).

You will often read that the bumps were invented by June E. Botich. Her patent, US 6,667,697, filed in 2002 and granted in 2003, describes raised edges along the sides of home row keys rather than bumps on top of F and J, and who first added the bumps is not well documented.

If the bumps on your keyboard are worn flat or very faint, small clear adhesive dots, sold as tactile markers for blind and partially sighted people, do the same job.

The home row on other keyboards

The physical keys and the fingers stay the same from one layout to the next. What changes is the letter printed on each key, so the home row reads differently depending on your keyboard:

On the Spanish, Brazilian, German and Turkish layouts, a letter that English does not use takes the right little finger's home key, where the semicolon sits on QWERTY. French AZERTY swaps A and Q, so the left little finger rests on Q, and brings M down to the home row. Dvorak puts all five vowels under the left hand (I is the left index finger's sideways reach) and the most common consonants under the right.

The touch typing lessons on this site follow the layout for each language (QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ, Spanish, Brazilian ABNT2 and Turkish Q), so the home keys they teach match the keyboard in front of you.

How to find home without looking

Do this every time you sit down, and every time your right hand comes back from the mouse:

1. Bring both hands to the keyboard with your fingers gently curved, as if holding a small ball.
2. Find the bumps with your index fingers.
3. Let the other fingers settle onto the keys beside them, touching lightly rather than pressing.
4. Rest your thumbs over the space bar.
5. Check yourself: type fjdksla; without looking. If that is what appears on the screen, you are home.

After a long reach, to Backspace, Enter or the number row, the same rule applies: touch the bump, then carry on. Once it is a habit it takes a fraction of a second, and it saves you the run of wrong letters you get when one hand has slipped a key to the side without you noticing.

Practise the home row in order

The home row is learned in pairs, from the index fingers outwards, which is the order the touch typing lessons use. Type each line three times without looking, and move on when you can get through it with no more than one mistake.

1. F and J

fff jjj fjf jfj ffj jjf

2. Add D and K

ddd kkk dkd kdk fdk jkd

3. Add S and L

sss lll sls lsl fds jkl

No real words yet, and there can't be any until the next step, because the only vowel on the QWERTY home row is A.

4. Add A and ;

aaa ;;; a;a ;a; fa; ja;

as ad add all ask asks dad fad fall falls

lad lads lass sad salad alas flask flasks

5. Add G and H

had has half hall halls shall glad glass gas

flag flags flash dash hash lash sash slash gala

Now whole sentences are possible, as long as you don't mind them sounding like a children's book written on a tight budget:

• a sad lad asks dad
• dad has a flask
• all lads shall dash
• half a glass; half a salad
• a lass has a flag
• glad dads ask a lad
• flags flash; lads dash

Capital letters and full stops are missing on purpose: Shift and the full stop are not on the home row. Every word above was chosen because it is common in ordinary English writing, not because it is merely possible. When these lines feel easy, move on to the top row, and the other vowels with it.

Habits that pull you off the home row

Most drifting comes from a handful of habits. Check yourself for these:

• Wandering little fingers. After Enter, Backspace or Shift, the right little finger often stays out at the edge of the keyboard instead of returning to ;. The next few letters then land one key off. Make the trip back part of the movement.
• One hand anchored, the other roaming. The Aalto study found that most people kept their left hand in one position but let their right hand travel back and forth across the keyboard. If that sounds like you, the right hand is the one to train.
• Resting the heels of your hands while you type. Planting your palms on the desk or a wrist rest bends your wrists upwards and turns every reach into a stretch. Let your wrists float while you type and rest them between bursts. Typing posture covers the rest of the setup.
• Hovering too high. Fingers held above the keys lose contact with the bumps and with each other. Rest them on the keys: touching, not pressing.
• Pressing too hard. The home keys are a resting place, not a launch pad. Most keys register well before they hit the bottom, so if your typing sounds like hail on a roof, ease off.

Where to start

Open lesson 1 and spend ten minutes on F and J, then add a pair of keys a day. Within a week you will have the whole home row, and the finger chart shows where each finger reaches from there. If you are coming from years of looking at the keys, read how to type without looking for a plan to break the habit for good.

Sources

• Feit, Weir and Oulasvirta, “How We Type: Movement Strategies and Performance in Everyday Typing”, CHI 2016; and Aalto University, “Ten fingers not needed for fast typing”, press release, 9 February 2016.
• June E. Botich, “Modified keys on a keyboard”, US patent 6,667,697, filed 2002, granted 2003. Google Patents.
• August Dvorak and William L. Dealey, typewriter keyboard, US patent 2,040,248, granted 1936.
• Shai Coleman, the Colemak keyboard layout, released 2006 (colemak.com).
• Letter counts: ten public-domain novels from Project Gutenberg (Pride and Prejudice, Moby Dick, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, A Tale of Two Cities, Frankenstein, Dracula, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Jane Eyre, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wuthering Heights), about 5.2 million letters, counted for this guide.