Typing On A Laptop

The first time most Pakistani students touch a laptop is in Class 7 or 8, often in a school computer room or at the kothi of a relative who works in an office. The laptop looks bigger than the phone, heavier, and at first more frightening. Take a breath. The laptop is just a phone with a wider screen and a bigger keyboard, glued to a flat board you can rest on your lap. Everything you already know about apps, websites, the cloud, and Wi Fi works the same way. Three new things meet you, the trackpad, the full keyboard, and the camera that hides above the screen.

The trackpad is the smooth rectangle below the keyboard. It is the laptop's version of touching the screen, except your finger does not touch the screen, it touches this little board, and a small arrow on the screen called the cursor moves where your finger moves. Drag one finger from the centre of the trackpad to the right, and the cursor slides to the right. To click, press down softly on the trackpad until you feel a small clack, the way you press the button on a doorbell. Two fingers dragged together upwards make the screen scroll up, like wiping a long page of homework upwards.

The four shortcuts that change everything. Hold Ctrl and press C to copy. Hold Ctrl and press V to paste. Hold Ctrl and press Z to undo your last mistake. Hold Ctrl and press S to save your work. On a Mac laptop, replace Ctrl with the Command key, the one with the small square symbol. These four combinations will save you ten thousand small movements of the cursor over your school years. Memorise them in one afternoon, by repeating each one fifty times in a notepad. By next week, your fingers will press them without you thinking.

Ten finger typing is a slow gift you give to your future self. Right now, like most beginners, you type with two fingers, hunting and pecking at the keys. This is fine for short messages. For writing a one page essay or a long email, ten finger typing is three times faster and far less tiring. The trick is to put your eight fingers on a row called the home row. Left hand on A S D F. Right hand on J K L semicolon. Both thumbs hover above the spacebar. From this position, every other letter is one short jump away. Free websites like typing club and ratatype teach this in fifteen minutes a day, and within a month you will type without looking down.

Posture matters more on a laptop than a phone. The phone is small and you hold it close. The laptop is big and you lean over it. Within an hour of bad posture, your neck hurts, your shoulders tighten, and your eyes burn. Sit on a chair with both feet on the floor. The screen should be at the same height as your eyes, not lower. If the laptop is on a table that is too low, place two fat books under it to raise the screen. Look away from the screen every twenty minutes, at something far away, the imli tree outside or the wall on the other side of the kamra. Your eyes are not built to stare at one distance for hours.