Home row typing drills

On a standard mechanical or laptop keyboard with 19.05 mm (0.75 in) center-to-center key spacing, your fingertips cannot see where the top or bottom rows sit. Instead, your motor cortex stores each key as a directional vector from the eight home-row keys: for example, E is stored as “left middle finger forward 19 mm and slightly left from D.” If your hand drifts half a key-width inward after reaching for G or Y, every subsequent reach on that hand lands on the wrong keycap.

If you are brand new to ten-finger placement, review the full column chart in touch typing for beginners first, then work through the five drills below in order.

Open any plain text area (or practice the rhythm directly before a 15-second typing test) and type each line three times at an even, unhurried beat. Never look down at the keycaps; if you lose your place, brush your index fingertips across the F and J bumps to re-center.

fdf jkj fdf jkj dfd kjk dfd kjk fjdk dkfj fjdk dkfj
fj dk fj dk jf kd jf kd ffjj ddkk fkjd dfjk fkjd

asdf jkl; asdf jkl; fdsa ;lkj fdsa ;lkj asdf ;lkj
skdl a;fj skdl a;fj alsk djf; alsk djf; sadf jkl;

fgf jhj fgf jhj gfg hjh gfg hjh fghj jhgf dfgh hjkl
fga hjl; fgdf jhjk gfds hjkl; fgf jhj glad half hash

all ask dad sad lad had has jaggas fall gall halllas
flask glass salad shall slash flagsalfalfa glad dash
a sad lad had a glass flask; dad shall ask jag

ded kik frf juj edde ikki rffr ujju red kid furire
fire ride like sure dark rule desk file saidgirl

Why do Drill 2 and Drill 3 focus so heavily on A, S, L, ; and G, H? Let's look at the keystroke math across a 250-character (50-word) passage:

Suppose your index and middle fingers execute 180 of those 250 keystrokes at an average interval of 140 ms per key (which equals 180 × 0.14 s = 25.2 seconds). The remaining 70 keystrokes involve outer ring/pinky letters (a, s, l, p, o, w) or lateral g / h stretches. If you hesitate and take 340 ms on each of those 70 outer reaches (70 × 0.34 s = 23.8 seconds), the 250-character passage takes 25.2 + 23.8 = 49.0 seconds, giving you 50 words ÷ (49 ÷ 60) = 61.2 WPM.

After two weeks of Drill 2 and Drill 3, trimming that outer-finger hesitation from 340 ms down to 210 ms saves 70 × 0.13 s = 9.1 seconds. Your total time drops from 49.0 s to 39.9 s, raising your net speed from 61.2 WPM to 75.2 WPM (+14 WPM) without moving your index or middle fingers a single millisecond faster. You can verify the exact character-to-minute impact on our WPM calculator.

• Pressing the space bar with both thumbs alternating at random: Pick one primary thumb (usually right thumb for right-handed typists) so space bar timing stays consistent between words.
• Curling the wrists inward to line up the pinky with A and ;: Keep a straight line from forearm through the back of your hand and slide the whole arm slightly when needed; see ergonomic typing posture.
• Practicing on a keyboard where home-row keys drop chords: When you practice fast inward rolls like asdf or jkl;, two or three keys briefly overlap. Verify that all eight home-row keys can register simultaneously on our keyboard rollover test and keyboard tester.