Being able to touch type is the ability of typing without looking at the keyboard. By touch-typing, the individual uses all fingers instead of just a few fingers. Consequently, typing speed increases dramatically.

I recently sat down with my 12-year-old son Ian, who agreed to sit still long enough to try a few typing teacher applications on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Ian has a lot of experience on the computer but, until now, he has subscribed to the hunt and peck typing philosophy. Fortunately, we found a number of open source typing tutorial programs to download and test.

1. Use !!
Typing !! followed by Enter will bring back and execute the last command (same as Ctrl+P followed by Enter).

In 1976 one man changed the face of text editors. That man is Bill Joy who developed vi for BSD UNIX. To those who are a bit unfamiliar with command line UNIX/Linux, vi (short for Visual) is a screen-oriented text editor that operates in two modes: insert mode and normal mode. Please reference here for a deeper explanation of its design and implementation.

"Dynamic abbreviation, available by calling dabbrev-expand or pressing M-/, is a generalization of the standard abbreviation system in Emacs and is one of it’s most productivity-enhancing features. Regular abbreviations, or abbrevs, are shortcuts for words and blocks of text that you type frequently..."

This summer, my Vietnamese Immersion Students at the American International School will spend about three weeks learning how to touch type in my computer class with Tux Typing, an open source typing tutorial program.

Anyone that has been reading these tips for any length of time knows that I am a command-line guy. It’s faster, more efficient, and more powerful. Sure, a nice GUI is great to look at, but to really get things done, give me the CLI any day. Even to this day I still use a text-mode e-mail client (Mutt) and text-mode IRC client (Irssi).

In addition to creating programming structures, you can also use the semi-colon to separate stand-alone commands that you want to execute from the same command entry. If you wanted to cd to a certain directory and then look at its contents, you could enter each command on its own line. Or, you could enter them both on the same line. This process is called command chaining.

Want to be faster at the Linux command line interface? Since most Linux distributions provide Bash as the default CLI, here are some Bash tricks that will help cut down the amount of typing needed to execute commands. Feel free to comment and share your own speed tricks.