Which Finger Types Which Key

There are only eight fingers doing the work, and each one owns a diagonal column of keys. Learn the pattern and you have learned the keyboard.

The rule that replaces memorising

Every row is assigned the same way, left to right:

little → ring → middle → index → index → index → index → middle → ring → little

The index fingers do double duty, covering two columns each, which is why they are the busiest and why F and J are the anchor keys. Everything else is one finger, one column, straight up and down.

The full chart

The three things people get wrong

Using the wrong shift key

For a capital letter, use the shift key on the opposite side from the letter. Capital A is right shift plus left little finger. Capital P is left shift plus right little finger.

Using the same-side shift makes your hand contort and is the most common cause of a stuck pinky. Learn it correctly early; it is miserable to fix later.

Letting the index finger wander

The index fingers cover two columns, so they travel more than any other finger — and they are the most likely to forget where home is. Bring them back to F and J after every reach. Feel the ridges.

Hunting for Backspace and Enter

Both belong to the right little finger, and both are reached without moving your other fingers off home. If you are relocating your whole hand to delete a character, you are paying that cost several times a minute.

About the little fingers

They are weak, slow and short, and everyone resents them. They are also responsible for the most-used non-letter keys on the board — shift, enter, backspace, and the letters A and P.

You cannot redistribute this. What you can do is stop lifting your whole hand to help them. Keep the other three fingers anchored and let the little finger stretch. It gets stronger surprisingly quickly.

Bad habits worth checking for

• Floating hands — fingers hovering rather than resting on home. You lose your reference and end up looking down.
• One finger doing a neighbour's job because it is "closer". It is closer once and wrong forever.
• Wrists planted hard on the desk, which forces finger stretching instead of small hand movement. See posture.
• Both thumbs fighting over the space bar. Pick one. It does not matter which.

Learning the chart is the easy part — an afternoon. Making it automatic takes a couple of weeks of not making exceptions. Drill it against the typing test, or let a game do the repetition while you are thinking about something else.