There's a lot hiding under the surface once you start digging into our typing trainer, typ.ing. Our latest update to typ.ing lets you design your own typing practice by saving custom texts to your user account.
This is in addition to the Readwise mode we introduced recently, which allows you to type your favorite book excerpts.
I can think of a couple of different scenarios where saving custom texts comes in handy; maybe you can think of others.
Personal typing benchmarks
In Oryx's old Live Training feature, you used to be able to type the same three passages from Alice in Wonderland over and over again. When that feature went away, I found out what people were using it for: Benchmarking.
We got multiple emails from people who would type these three passages, go away for a while to use other training features, then come back after a few weeks to type that same exact text again and see how they're doing now.
This is now possible with any text you like. Just save it, and come back to it.
Personally meaningful texts
Repetition works. Texts that we repeat become ingrained — we learn them by rote. If that text is meaningful and actionable for you, typing it over and over again can be a powerful way to master it.
This doesn't have to be a long text. If you do this, obviously choose something that works for you, and also be sure to edit it if it ever feels less relevant or no longer rings true. And when you type it, try to type it with intent.
Specific coding languages
While we have a dedicated code mode with syntax highlighting for several languages, those snippets are preset. If you want to type out snippets in some other language, or create a richer collection of snippets to work through, saving your own custom texts is a great way to do this.
Specific human languages
Typ.ing's common words mode supports English, French, German, and Spanish. While these languages are common, there are numerous other languages that our users type in.
Another thing about the common words mode is that it's all about... common words. It's in the name. So you do get to train on those standalone words, which is useful — but it's not prose.
By saving custom texts in your language of choice, typ.ing becomes fully international. You can create a custom text of the most common words in your language, but you can also save excerpts of prose which could be more interesting than just random words.
Your turn
What will you be using custom text for? I'd love to hear your use case — email me at [email protected].
