The home row

Why a home row exists at all

Touch typing is not memorising where 26 keys are. It is memorising eight positions and then learning every other key as a movement relative to one of them. That is a much smaller thing to learn, and it is the whole reason the method works.

It also solves the problem of getting back. A finger that has just reached for P needs to know where it is afterwards, and the answer cannot be "look". It returns to its home key, and the next keystroke starts from a known position rather than from wherever the hand happened to end up.

This is what the small raised bumps on F and J are for. They let both hands find the row by feel, from anywhere, without a glance — and they are on almost every keyboard sold, including ones for scripts that have no F or J.

Which finger goes where?

Eight fingers rest on eight keys. One thumb takes the space bar — see the guide on finger placement for why one rather than both. Everything else is reached from here and returned to here.

What does the home row look like in other scripts?

The principle survives everywhere; the letters do not. A Russian ЙЦУКЕН keyboard has ФЫВА under the left hand and ОЛДЖ under the right. A Greek layout puts ΑΣΔΦ and ΗΞΚΛ there. Devanagari InScript, Tamil 99, Hebrew, Georgian and the rest each have their own eight, chosen — usually — so that the most frequent characters of the language fall under the strongest fingers.

This is why learning to touch type transfers between scripts far better than people assume, and also why it feels like it does not at first. The motions are identical. What has changed is which letter each motion produces, and that is a memory problem rather than a physical one.

The scripts where the idea genuinely bends are the ones typed through an input method. In Chinese, Japanese and Korean you are typing sounds or components on a Latin or phonetic layout and selecting the written form afterwards, so the home row is still the home row — it is simply not producing the characters you will end up with.

How should I drill the home row?

Slowly, with your eyes on the screen, and for far longer than feels necessary. The home row is the stage people rush, and rushing it is why so many self-taught typists have a fast right hand and a left little finger that has never once been used.

Start one hand at a time — ffff dddd ssss aaaa, then jjjj kkkk llll — until each finger moves without the others tensing. Then alternate hands, which is a different skill and the one that produces rhythm. Only then move to real words made from home-row letters, of which English has a surprising number: fall, salad, alaska, flask, lad, ask, all.

The rule that matters more than any drill: after every reach, the finger comes back. Not eventually, not when convenient — immediately, as part of the same motion. A hand that drifts is a hand that will need to look.

Eyes on the screen

Every glance down rehearses the habit you are trying to remove. Cover the keyboard if you must.

One hand at a time first

Independent fingers come before coordinated hands.

Return after every reach

The return is part of the keystroke, not something that happens afterwards.

Accuracy before speed

A drill typed with errors is practice at making errors.

Short and daily

Ten minutes a day beats an hour a week, because what decays between sessions is recall.