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Comment by greglindahl | Hacker News Reader

I touch type, and I've never touch typed a function key.

I had to (briefly) use a touchbar Mac while running Visual Studio for debugging and the lack of buttons made it an excruciatingly painful process. I never before thought I touch typed function keys, but I actually did.

You got me on lack of precision - you don't need to be touch typing for physical FN keys to be useful.

I realise that whilst just about everything else I do on the keyboard is proper touch (based from F-J), I have to move my whole hands to use the FN keys. I will nevertheless hit F5, F9 etc for compiling / break points / step debugging without looking down at the keyboard.

I on the other hand do not touch type (very well), and regularly touch type function keys (F5-F12 while debugging).

Every time I debug, for the past 25 years.

This doesn't mean everyone else follows the same pattern.

To be fair, Apple's F keys aren't even touch-typist friendly because there's no grouping.

I'm listening to music all day. Changing the volume and skipping tracks without looking is great to keep the flow going.

You know where the F-keys are due to experience, and also the sound control is right next to the power button. If you don't use them a lot, you look at your keyboard, but for infrequent usage that's OK since it does not occur a lot. Non-issue, and bad example. I use expose, sound & brightness control most and I can use them all blindly. Just like I can use Esc blindly. Controlling music or changing keyboard brightness I have to look but I don't use these a lot. And with that being said I seem to get pretty good at getting to pause/play key without looking.

And the ESC key?

If you aren't accessing the volume control or screen brightness keys without looking down then you're not really a touch typist :)

You are not a real touch typist, if you don't write with butterflies.

Or if you don't listen to music. Or if you use a desk where you don't ever have to adjust the screen brightness.

I never realized all of the complexity that developers were required to deal with.

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