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Comment by Merad | Hacker News Reader

The real question is, does it matter? I've been programming for nearly 15 years and I'm really struggling to think of a time that my productivity has been limited by the speed with which I can interact with the computer. I've never actually tried to keep track of how my time is spent, but these days I wouldn't be surprised if I average 5+ minutes of reading/thinking/planning/discussing/etc. for every minute spent editing code.

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For me, it's a matter of maintaining flow. I don't type code all the time, but when I do, I want to edit at the speed of thought.

I suspect you'd need a few chord based keyboards to edit at the speed of though.

To be honest, I'd go even further - I think we rarely code more than 10% of our time. I know, there is an argument that implementation matters – you don't think about typing at all with good sense of the keyboard, but I personally think it is overrated; unless you are super slow typists, it does not really matter.

What matters, though, is the fact that it is some kind of an art – people master it, people enjoy when they are able to accomplish some tasks in an elegant way (coarse example is macro in vim).

I experienced this recently. Crashed my bike, and broke my wrists. Had about a month where I could only type with one finger at a time, or gently use a touchpad. I thought it would be fine, since I could take my time and think things through fully in my head before typing the code. Instead, I found it so difficult - as if I could only think as quickly as I could type.

I use my keyboard plenty when just navigating and reading code. The mainline at work is some 100k+ source files

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