Increasing Typing Speed

I am not aware of its Window’s counterpart, but the keyboard in iOS and MacOS come with a feature called Text Replacement (see references below). It’s very handy if your work involves a lot of typing.

But what words should you replace?

I figured the logical thing to do is find out my most frequently used words and replace the top 25-50. I found a python script** that let’s you run through a folder in your system and find the most frequently used words in the files in it. I then ran it through my journals folder; I modified it to include only those words that are longer than 3 letters and have a frequency of over 70 or more. Here’s my result:

b’things’ 300 b’tags:’ 247 b’should’ 220 b’about’ 215 b’Links’ 193 b"don’t” 182 b’#journal’ 174 b’title:Journal’ 170 b’Journal’ 164 b’first’ 135 b’writing’ 127 b’reading’ 124 b’because’ 123 b’these’ 120 b’write’ 117 b’other’ 115 b’finish’ 114 b’think’ 109

And here’s the piece of code:

import os
from collections import Counter

# Open target folder
path = 'path to folder'
folder = os.listdir(path)
count = Counter()

# Open files in folder
for file in folder:
    fname = os.path.join(path,file)
    # Add words to counter and their frequency to count
    with open(fname, 'rb') as f:
        count += Counter(f.read().split())

# Print most frequent words in count
for word, c in count.most_common(100):
    if len(word) > 4 and c > 70:
        print(word,c)

Is there a more efficient way to do this? I couldn’t get my head around the glob function. Is it a better function?

Links

**Source

References

A more detailed note that landed on my Feedly some while back on increasing your typing speed that got me thinking about it.

How to type 3x faster

Another essay that I think about often is that of Ben Kuhn on impatience