Typing tips and tricks

Twenty-one small habits and shortcuts that make everyday typing faster, from your desk setup to deleting a whole word in one key press.

Take a one-minute test

Watch a fast typist at work for ten minutes and you'll notice that a lot of their speed never shows up on a typing test. They delete a wrong word with one key press instead of six. They jump to the end of a line without reaching for the mouse. They type their email address by typing three characters. None of that changes their WPM, and all of it gets the work done sooner.

This page collects 21 tips like that: a few for your desk, a few for your hands, a few for how you practise, and the editing shortcuts that save more time in real work than another 10 WPM would. The core method for building raw speed (accuracy first, touch typing, drilling your slowest letter pairs, a steady rhythm) is in how to type faster, so it isn't repeated here.

Set up your desk

1. Lay the keyboard flat, or tilt it away from you

The little feet under the back edge of most keyboards tilt the keys towards you, which bends your wrists upwards the whole time you type. Fold them away. If you can, go one step further and let the keyboard slope slightly away from you. In a 1995 study published in the journal Ergonomics, typists given a keyboard tray that sloped away from them chose an angle of about 12 degrees, and their wrists went from bending back by about 13 degrees to almost exactly straight. You don't need a special tray for most of the benefit: feet folded, keyboard flat, and a chair high enough that your forearms slope gently down to the keys.

2. Set your chair from your elbows

Sit back, let your shoulders drop and bend your elbows to about a right angle. The home row should sit at or a little below elbow height. If your shoulders creep up while you type, the desk is too high for you: raise the chair and put something under your feet. A laptop can't be set up well, because when the keyboard is at the right height the screen is too low. For an hour of email that doesn't matter. For a day of writing, plug in a separate keyboard and raise the laptop to eye level on a stand or a pile of books. The posture guide has the full setup.

3. Make sure your computer agrees with your keyboard

If Shift and 2 gives you " when you wanted @, your computer thinks you have a UK keyboard and you have a US one, or the other way round. The same mismatch moves # and \ and a few other symbols. People live with this for years, look for the symbol every time, and wonder why punctuation slows them down. Check the keyboard layout in your system's language or keyboard settings and make it match the keys printed in front of you. It takes a minute, and your fingers can finally learn where things are.

Use your hands well

4. Press lightly and let go early

A key doesn't have to hit the bottom to count. A popular mechanical switch such as Cherry's MX Red registers at 2 mm of its 4 mm of travel, and laptop keys need only a short tap. Hammering every key into the desk costs effort, makes noise and tires your fingers, and it doesn't make you any faster. Try a minute of typing as quietly as you can and compare the score with your usual one. If it's the same, you've been working harder than you needed to. (Shopping for a new keyboard? Best keyboard for typing explains which differences matter.)

5. Come home after every reach

Every reach to the top or bottom row should end with the finger back on its home key. If your fingers drift and hover, the next reach starts from the wrong place and lands on the key next door, which the results page on this site counts separately as a “neighbouring key” mistake. The small bumps on F and J let you check your position by touch at any moment without looking down. Home row keys has the full map of where each finger rests.

6. Shift with the other hand

For a capital typed by your left hand, hold the right Shift; for one typed by your right hand, hold the left. Using the same hand for both forces your little finger and the letter finger to stretch away from each other, which slows that key down and causes errors. If you've always used one Shift key, this feels clumsy for a few days. After that it's automatic, and capitals stop being speed bumps in your sentences.

7. Give the space bar one habit

Space is the most common character in ordinary English text, about one in every five or six. Some typists always press it with the right thumb; others use the thumb of the hand that didn't type the last letter. Both work well. What costs time is having no habit at all, so that every space involves a tiny decision about which thumb goes down. Pick one way, use it for a week, and stop thinking about it.

8. Fix mistakes now or later, but decide which

The most expensive mistake is the one you notice three words late. Going back means stopping, finding it, deleting good text along with the bad and retyping all of it. Fast typists spend far less time on this. In a 2018 study of 168,960 typists, Backspace and Delete made up about 3.4% of the key presses of the fastest tenth, against 9% for the slowest tenth.

A simple rule works for most people. If you feel a mistake in the word you're typing, fix it at once. If you spot one further back, finish the sentence first, then jump back with the shortcuts in tip 16. In a typing test, fix as you go: the tests here count only correctly typed words, so a word left wrong is lost entirely.

9. Keep your nails out of the way

If your nails reach past your fingertips, you can't strike the keys with the pads of your fingers, so you end up typing on the nail or flattening your fingers to make room. Both are slower and less accurate. Short nails are the simple fix. If you like them long, the technique changes rather than stops: see how to type with long nails.

Practise smarter

10. Pick the test length for what you want to know

A 15-second test measures your burst speed: what your fingers can do on easy words before your focus slips. A 60-second test measures the speed you can actually hold, which is much closer to how you type an email. Both are useful, but don't compare one with the other, because short tests usually flatter you. For tracking progress, use the same length every time and make it a minute. This site has 15-second, 30-second and one-minute tests, plus tests of 10, 25 or 50 words.

11. Warm up before you measure

Your first test of the day is often your slowest. Your fingers are cold, your rhythm hasn't settled and you're more likely to tense up. Two or three minutes of easy typing first, at a pace that feels almost lazy, gives you a fairer number and better practice afterwards. Even a one-minute warm-up beats starting cold.

12. Repeat hard words slowly and perfectly

When a word keeps tripping you up, type it five times in a row at about two thirds of your normal speed without a single mistake, then once at full speed. If you slip, slow down further. The aim is to give your fingers a clean pattern to copy; repeating a word fast and wrong mostly practises the wrong version. The practice drill on the results page does something similar for you, with a short test full of words that contain your slowest letters and letter pairs.

13. Practise the keys tests leave out

Most typing tests, including the standard ones on this site, are plain lower-case words. Real writing is full of capitals, commas, full stops, apostrophes, numbers and the occasional bracket, and that's exactly where everyday speed drops. Give them their own practice. The touch typing lessons cover capitals with each Shift key, then numbers (lessons 19 to 21) and punctuation and symbols (lessons 22 to 25). They work just as well as a refresher if you already know the letters.

14. Track the middle score, not the best

Your best test is part skill and part luck: a run of easy words, no stumbles, a good minute. Chase it and you'll feel stuck for weeks. Take three to five one-minute tests and write down the middle one, the median. Once a week is enough. It moves more slowly than your best, but when it moves, the improvement is real.

Everyday tricks that save more time than speed

These shortcuts work in nearly every app on Windows and Mac: word processors, browsers, email and chat. Each one replaces a run of key presses or a trip to the mouse. Learn one a week and they add up quickly.

15. Delete words, not letters, and undo instead of retyping

Holding Backspace to rub out a wrong word is slow and imprecise: you overshoot, then retype letters you didn't mean to lose. Ctrl + Backspace on Windows, or Option + Delete on a Mac, removes the whole word before the cursor in one press. Press it twice for two words. On Windows, Ctrl + Delete removes the word after the cursor. And when you've deleted or pasted something by mistake, undo brings it back faster than you could ever retype it.

16. Jump by words and lines

Tapping the arrow key twelve times to reach a typo is a habit worth breaking. Hold Ctrl on Windows or Option on a Mac, and each arrow press moves a whole word. Home and End go to the start and end of the line on Windows. On a Mac, use Cmd with the left or right arrow instead: there, Home and End scroll the page without moving the cursor, which surprises everyone the first time. The table above has the jumps to the very start and end of a document.

17. Select without the mouse

Every movement shortcut becomes a selection shortcut when you add Shift. Shift + Ctrl + ← selects the word before the cursor on Windows, and Shift + Option + ← does it on a Mac. Shift + Home selects back to the start of the line. When you do reach for the mouse, double-click to select a word and triple-click to select a paragraph in most word processors and browsers. It's quicker than dragging across text and missing the last letter.

18. Let the clipboard remember for you

Windows keeps a history of everything you copy once you switch it on: press Windows + V, choose Turn on, and from then on the same keys show your recent copies, ready to paste again. On a Mac running macOS Tahoe or later, Spotlight keeps a similar list (open Spotlight with Cmd + Space, then press Cmd + 4). And when pasted text arrives in the wrong font and colour, paste it as plain text instead: Ctrl + Shift + V in most Windows apps, Option + Shift + Cmd + V on a Mac.

19. Make text replacement type your repeats

Your email address, your phone number, your sign-off, the sentence you paste into every other support reply: none of these needs typing more than once. On a Mac, add shortcuts in System Settings › Keyboard › Text Replacements. On an iPhone, it's Settings › General › Keyboard › Text Replacement, and in Gboard on Android, Settings › Dictionary › Personal dictionary, where each word can have a shortcut. Windows has nothing built in that works in every app, but Word and Outlook have AutoCorrect (File › Options › Proofing › AutoCorrect Options), and Microsoft's free PowerToys can map a key combination to a piece of text. Choose shortcuts that are never real words, such as ;em for your email, so they don't fire by accident.

20. Dictate first drafts

For long, loose writing such as notes, rough drafts and long messages, speaking is faster than any typist. In a 2017 lab study by researchers at Stanford University and the University of Washington, people entered short messages on a phone almost three times faster by voice (153 WPM) than with the keyboard (52 WPM). Press Windows + H to start voice typing on Windows. On a Mac, press the microphone key if your keyboard has one, or use the dictation shortcut set in System Settings › Keyboard › Dictation, which on many Macs is the Fn or Globe key pressed twice. Then switch to the keyboard to edit, which is where typing skill pays off.

21. Stop hunting for symbols

Looking for ©, ° or ½ in a menu breaks your flow every time. Windows + . opens a panel with emoji, symbols and special characters. On a Mac, Ctrl + Cmd + Space opens the Character Viewer, which does the same job and has a search box, so typing “degree” is faster than scrolling. On Windows, the panel's Symbols tab sorts them into groups such as currency and maths. For a symbol you use every day, a text replacement from tip 19 is faster still.

Where to start

Don't try all 21 at once; you'll remember none of them. This week, fold the keyboard feet, check which Shift key you use, and learn the delete-a-word shortcut for your computer. Next week, add jumping by words and one text replacement for your email address. In the meantime, take a one-minute test a few times a week and note the middle score.

If raw speed is what you want to change, follow the plan in how to type faster. For bigger targets, how to type 100 WPM explains what to work on at each speed.

Sources

• Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, “Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes”, CHI 2018.
• Hedge and Powers, “Wrist postures while keyboarding: effects of a negative slope keyboard system and full motion forearm supports”, Ergonomics 38(3), 1995.
• Ruan, Wobbrock, Liou, Ng and Landay, “Comparing Speech and Keyboard Text Entry for Short Messages in Two Languages on Touchscreen Phones”, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 1(4), 2017.
• Cherry, MX2A Red switch data sheet.
• Microsoft Support, “Keyboard shortcuts in Windows”, “Keyboard shortcuts in Word” and “Add or remove AutoCorrect entries in Word”; Microsoft Learn, “PowerToys Keyboard Manager”.
• Apple Support, “Mac keyboard shortcuts”, “Dictate messages and documents on Mac” and “Set up shorthand for frequently used text on iPhone”.