Learn touch typing without looking down
It starts with two keys — the two your index fingers are already resting on. Every drill after that is built from the keys you have unlocked and the keys you keep missing.
Already type without looking? Take the arcade run — about thirty seconds, and it tells you your words per minute and the keys you keep missing. Or skip to symbol drills for Python, C++ and HTML.
J and F. The two index fingers, on the only keys with tactile bumps. Every other key is found relative to these.
In one paragraph
KeySlice is a free touch-typing trainer. It teaches the keyboard two keys at a time in the century-old KTouch order, starting with J and F, and builds every drill from the keys your lesson path has unlocked plus the keys you personally keep missing. It also has an arcade run where your typing speed is your travel speed. No account is needed to play and there is nothing to download; progress stays in your browser unless you choose to sign in.
Then it becomes a game. Try it — type the word.
0.00 kmLesson one, right here
Just start typing. Errors are marked and cannot be backspaced — accuracy first.
The key order is not invented
Two keys at a time, paired across hands, working outward from the strongest fingers to the weakest. Step through it — the board is the curriculum.
J and F — 2 keys unlocked. The two index fingers, on the only keys with tactile bumps. Every other key is found relative to these.
Amber keys are the pair this lesson introduces. Lit keys are everything unlocked so far. The two dots are the tactile bumps on F and J.
Then the keyboard fades and you fly
The second half of the product is a run, not a test. Your typing speed is your travel speed, the distance you cover is the score, every word you clear is cut in half, and the only thing you race is a ghost of your own best run. One wrong key costs speed and everything you have not banked.
- Speed
- Never shown as a number. It is how fast the field moves, and it bleeds away the moment you stop.
- Score
- Distance, which is the integral of that. Clearing the target does not end the run.
- Rival
- A ghost of your own best run. You are never ranked against other people and nothing is uploaded for comparison.
- Banking
- Every correct character raises a multiplier and a pot a single wrong key wipes. Tab pays it out.
The ladder is computed, not written
Every level is generated from the curriculum at build time: placement levels from how many keys a unit adds, run levels from how much vocabulary it unlocks, and exactly one test.
See the whole ladder — every chapter on one page.
What the end of a run tells you
Example report — not your data
The three keys that cost you most
Stored in your browser, and uploaded only if you sign in to sync.
A run does not end in four bare numbers. It ends by naming the three keys that cost you most and what they cost you last time — and those three are already weighted into the next drill you get. Every keystroke in the arcade writes to the same per-key record the lessons build, so the game is not a detour from the course.
The method, in full
Why self-taught typing stops near 40 WPM
Almost everyone who types for a living is self-taught, and self-taught typing converges on the same place: somewhere near 40 words per minute, six or seven fingers, eyes flicking down several times a sentence. Fast enough never to feel urgent, slow enough to cost hours a week.
It plateaus because hunt-and-peck is a visual skill — you locate a key, then press it — while touch typing is a motor skill, where the finger already knows where to go. More practice at hunt-and-peck makes you a faster looker, not a typist.
Breaking out means one deliberately uncomfortable week. You cover your hands or simply stop looking, your speed collapses to something humiliating, and then it climbs back past where it started. Nearly all the value of a structured course is that it makes that week short and survivable, by only ever asking you to place a few new keys at a time.
Learn the keys in the order your fingers can absorb them
A typing curriculum is really a schedule for introducing keys, and this schedule is not
invented. It follows the progression used by KTouch and GNU Typist, which encodes the order
typing textbooks have used since the typewriter era: two keys at a time,
starting with j and f — the two
keys with tactile bumps, which your index fingers can find without looking. Then k and d,
then l and s, working outward from the strongest fingers to the weakest.
Notice what that order is not: it is not row by row. Learning the whole top row at
once is a ten-key jump, and no established course does it. The rows interleave, because the
right next key is the one your hand can already almost reach — so
e arrives early while y and
z are saved for last. The first lessons have too few letters to
spell any word at all, so they drill key patterns, exactly as the traditional courses do.
Real words appear the moment the letters exist to make them.
Drills generated from your errors, not from a fixed list
Every keystroke is recorded as two numbers: whether it was correct, and how long it took
after the previous key. Those roll up into a per-key score, and the words you are given are
weighted toward your weakest keys. If your c is reliable but
slow and your ; is inaccurate, the next drill is quietly full
of both.
This matters because typing weakness is uneven and almost invisible from an overall score. Two people can both type 52 WPM while one loses their time on the bottom row and the other on the number row, and a generic drill helps neither of them. Mastered keys stop consuming practice time — but they do come back on a schedule, because a key drilled to accuracy in week one and never touched again decays, and what matters is what survives.
Typing code is a different skill
English prose is a poor proxy for programming. Ordinary text is overwhelmingly lower-case letters on the home and top rows. Code is dense with brackets, braces, semicolons, underscores and operators, which sit on exactly the keys most typists never drilled and are reached with the weakest fingers. A programmer who types 70 WPM on prose can drop under 30 on a block of real code.
So the code drills use real syntax, one language at a time. Python leans on colons, underscores and indentation. C++ is full of braces, semicolons, angle brackets and scope operators. HTML is almost entirely angle brackets, quotes and slashes. Practising the language you actually write is worth more than practising all three.
How to practise so that it sticks
Short and frequent beats long and occasional: fifteen minutes daily will beat two hours on a Sunday, because motor learning consolidates between sessions rather than during them. Keep accuracy near 95% — below that you are rehearsing errors, and far above it you are typing inside your comfort zone and not improving.
Never look down, even when it is slower, because looking down is the habit you are here to replace. And stop when you get sloppy, since practice past fatigue teaches the sloppy version.
For the full method — home position, the four rules that decide whether it sticks, and a realistic week-by-week schedule — read how to learn touch typing. The blog covers the parts the usual advice skips, like why your speed drops before it climbs.
Questions people actually ask
How long does it take to learn touch typing?
Most adults reach usable touch typing — around 30 WPM without looking down — in three to six weeks of 15 minutes a day. Getting to 60 WPM typically takes a few months. The variable that matters is not total hours but whether you stop looking at the keyboard early, which is uncomfortable for the first week and is the single thing that decides the outcome.
Should I learn accuracy or speed first?
Accuracy, and it is not close. Speed built on a shaky key map plateaus fast, because every error costs a backspace plus the pause that follows it. Practising at roughly 95% accuracy and letting speed follow is slower for a week and faster after a month.
Is KeySlice free?
Yes. Every lesson, drill and test is free, with nothing to download and no account needed to play. Your progress is stored in your own browser. Signing in is optional and only syncs that progress between your devices.
Do I need an account, and where is my progress stored?
No account is needed to play. Progress lives in your browser local storage, which means clearing site data will clear it, and another device starts fresh. Two ways to move it: export a resume link and open it on the other browser, or sign in with Google, which syncs automatically. Signing in is optional and the trainer is complete without it.
What makes this different from Monkeytype or keybr?
Monkeytype is a measurement tool and keybr is an adaptive drill generator. Both are excellent and neither teaches a curriculum. KeySlice runs a lesson path from the home row out to capitals, and every drill is generated from the keys that path has unlocked plus the keys you personally keep missing — so the practice and the lesson are the same thing rather than two separate tabs.
Can I practise typing code?
Yes. There are three code tracks — Python, C++ and HTML — and each drills hand-written snippets in that language rather than prose. Brackets, semicolons, underscores and arrows sit on the keys most people are weakest on, and drilling prose never touches them. The mix differs enough between languages that practising the one you actually write is worth more than practising all three.
Does it work on a phone?
KeySlice is built for a physical keyboard, which is what touch typing is. It loads on a phone and the written guides are readable there, but the drills assume ten fingers on real keys. An on-screen keyboard trains thumbs, so the speed it reports is not a number worth writing down.
What counts as a good typing speed?
Around 40 WPM is average for an adult who types daily. 60 to 80 WPM is comfortably fast and enough for almost any office or programming job. Above 100 WPM is competitive territory. For programmers, raw WPM matters less than accuracy on symbols.