Blindtyping.

Editing while writing is an annoying habit people get into, where instead of cranking out a draft, they would look back at the words they've just written and try to make them just a bit better. While it does result in slightly better prose, the speed it takes away from writing is significant, and it's almost always slower than speeding through a draft first then editing it on a second pass..

There are multiple tricks to use to avoid editing while drafting. A few I've heard of include typing with white text on white background, using a website such as ????, which automatically blurrs the text once you stop typing and eventually might even delete your draft if you stop typing for long enough. Others just use sheer force of will to force themselves to type ahead and leave mistakes be in the first draft.

Me, however... I started using a different technique ever since I [learned to touch type].  Now, when touch-typing, I don't need to look at the text I'm typing. As such, I can keep my eyes closed while I type—which is how I started, with a scarf as a blindfold—or I could just make sure I can't see what I'm typing as I do. In my case, I just push the text editor off-screen, and keep typing into the void; when I'm finished, I just pull it back out and copy out my text to where I need it.

Blindfolded typing is a bit different from regular wirting. While in regular writign you can always go up and see what you've written before, when typing blindfolded, you can only remember what's still in your mind. And for me at least, that's about a sentence of text, plus a general idea of what I've said so far.
I find that the resulting text is typically a lot smoother a better-flowing. *prose- I'm guessing that's because I'm following my train of thourght as it goes, instead of going back and forth trying to weave a coherent piece of text from a bunch of jumbled *mess- jumping back and forth.

At the same time, blindfolded typing has a few downsides. For one, I often leave in a lot of typos in the text, and need to read it caarefully afterwards—typos such as swapping letters because of bad muscle memory, shifting my whole hand off by one key for an entire paragraph, accidentially navigating with arrow keys into the middle of a sentence, and so on. Also, if I do come up with a better way to say something as I'm writing it, I usually can't fix it afterwards—any big edits often stick out from the blind-typed text. And finally, certain syntactic constructes, like quotes, are very hard to use while blindfolded.

From my time editing text files and blind-typing, I've picked up a few tip and tricks, which you might find useful, even if you are not into blindtyping:

* Ctrl-left and ctrl-right move by whole words. *hkolding down ctrl- This lets you go back into a sentece you've just blindtyped, and add an extra word or two.
* In addition, Ctrl-Shift-Left/Right moves and sellects a whole word. -- Moves the edge of the selection by a whole word - or selectes the previous/next word if you don.'t have a selection. . Granted, I would usually suggest to not select text while blindtyping (because a single mispress can destroy lines of content), I usually use selections to replace a previous word. You could also use Ctrl+Backspace and Ctrl+Delete to move by delete whole words. --move--
* Have some way to mak parts of the text that need to be fixed, or fixes suggested for the previous sentence. Oftentimes, I would come up with a better way to say something right after I write it. But rather than go back and delete it (which would deeat the purpose of drafting without editing), since doing that is going to be very hard without counting off words mentally, I prefer to just leave myself a piece of text surrounded by some special symbol that sets it apart. Initially, I used `[]` to set off text that needs to be fixed, or comments that need to be applied, but recently, I'm starting to use other characters too. For example, this post makes use of `*-` to set off edits.
* Save work regularly, and make sure that oyu are still typing into the right window periodically*-. . I've lost whole stories by typing into the 
the wrong window while blindfolded.
* Be prepared to edit. A lot. Blindfold typing rarely leaves pretty text; chances are (as mentioned before) that you would need to dit most of it for it to be ready for presenting.

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In a sense, blindfold typing is somewhat similar to Large Language Model text generation—you type the words in one at a time, never going back to edit them.As a human, you have the advantage that you can keep a more structured thought process in mind, instead of rereading the whole output so far to figure out where you are. The machine *in addition, yuo have the advantage of putting actual experience into what you write, and not just a grand average of all articles you've seen before- A machine, however, has the advantage of having a much clearer output, with no typos, no run-on sentences, and no misplaced words.

However, in the end, content trumps form. And if you can't ever coax an article into a blank sheet of paper, because you keep getting stuck on fixing mistakes, perhaps it's time you stop staring at the blank piece of paper. Instead, you can just write (type), without looking, and leave the form for some time later.

--

A curious thing about blindtyping is that it tends to make me sleepy. So, if you are planning to try blindtyping, I would recommend doing it at a time of the day when being sleepy is something you would be okay with.

Additionally, blind typing is not very good at dealing with distractions. Anything that might cause you to lose your train of thought is something that can derail the text you are drafting and cause you to restart a thought or write disconnected pieces of a text.

The combination of those two things means that blindtyping is almost a kind of seance—you press keys on a keyboard, focused on the story you are trying to tell, and by necessity zone everything else out, for you need all the focus you have to keep the prose flowing. And at the end, when you decide you've had enough for one session, you feel like you've just woken up.

But honestly, the best part for me is the fact that I can spare my eyes a bit of screen fatigue. Compared to all the other looking at computer screens I do over the course of the day, the few minutes I might save by blindtyping aren't much, but it's still rest that otherwise requires me to neither type nor read. So for writing-heavy days it makes a lot of sense.


As you might guess, this whole blog post has been blind-typed. I did that in KWrite, a version of KDE's Kate editor, except made more minimal without support for opening whole directories of files and such. I initially tried switching the theme to an all-blacktheme, but sadly this stilll leaves the text cursor / caret blinking in white in the middle of the page, which would proove distracting, so I went back to my earlier technique and pushed the editor off the screen's edge as well.
I canven't used blindtyping for any other posts s ofar, but honesy, it takes a lot less time for an initial draft that my usual technique.
If you like the result, in terms of flow and flow and structure and content, especially as compared to my other posts, you should consider trying it out yourselves! Otherwise, you might like [Joel's post on his own blogging techniques], which is pretty good too.

Also, what you've just read has been lightly edited. Ifyou want to see the original result of two blind-typing sessions, you can check it out [here] *pre-editing-

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This has been my 17th?? post of #100DaysToOffload. Hopefully I can use this technique to write some of the remaining 83 posts for the year! :sparkles:

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