Every programmer needs to be a typist, so I was always trying to improve my typing speed. In this article I’ll share some websites that can help you practice your typing skills and my experience of using them.
Most of typing tutors are aimed for general english, and do not provide practice for special characters used frequently in programming.
Typing tutorials and online tools especially for programmers are mostly based on open source code and allow you to practice typing the key sequences that appear in real code, even the awkward characters in code.
Typing.io
Typing.io is the most famous typing practice website for programmers so far, and it supports both Free Plan and Mechanical Plan. I only tried the free plan, with which you’ll have access to Typing Lessons in 16 Languages, Realistic Key Processing Engine and Typo Cost Analysis, but you have to pay $9.99 a month to get other services, like Typing Fingering Guide and Uploading personal codes.
SpeedCoder
SpeedCoder is new, but it’s the best online typing practice tool for programmers I’ve used ever! So far, this typing tutor for programmers is free to use. The ads are a distraction but then the developer must pay for it somehow. SpeedCoder covers twelve programming languages, and you have the flexibility to upload your own code for practice (only C, C++, Java, PHP and JavaScript source codes are supported).
Typing practice of general English
Ztype: An online game to shoot English words, with levels from easy to difficult
TypeRacer: An online typing competition allows people to race each-other by typing quotes from books, movies, and songs
Keybr.com: A free online typing tutorial with historical statistics of all your typing practice
shortcutFoo
shortcutFoo is an online tool for programmers to improve your programming speed by practising the shortcuts of major IDEs, thus to make your editor fun, easy, and effective. Akin to the days of first learning how to type on a keyboard, shortcutFoo aims to help programmers accomplish more in less time and with fewer keystrokes.