Ask HN: Does anyone else press keys in wrong order for certain words everytime? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does anyone else press keys in wrong order for certain words everytime?

19 pointsrahulskn8618 comments

For me, whenever I need to type `length`, I would always type `lenght` first and then correct it. Is there a way to get rid of this annoying habit?

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One suggestion: rather than just retyping the 'th', retype the whole word 'length'.

Steve Yegge's advice for learning 'licks' was "go fast; go slow; go target pace". https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtie...

I had always thought I do this because some other word that I type a lot has the letters in that order. For example, you say you keep typing lenght. Well, once you fix that, will you start typing ligth instead of light? (Or any of the many words that are ght. It's a common combination in English.)

Wow, that's an interesting hypothesis! I just pulled up a random wordlist on GitHub (370k words) [1]. Searching it in a text editor, "ght" appears 1621 times and "gth" only appears 77 times! So perhaps habitual mistakes like these really are caused by the higher frequency of a different ordering of the same letters.

[1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dwyl/english-words/master/...

https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/sl

whenever you mistype ‘ls’ as ‘sl’, you can have a steam locomotive run across your terminal with the above installed

I’m convinced this is a result of typing on a keyboard - it seldom happens when I’m writing.
I think that after a typing for a while, your brain tries to introduce some optimization, i.e. while your one finger goes for the letter ‘t’ (my left hand), your brain queues up the letter ‘h’ for another finger on your other hand. Quite often, and possibly because I’m right hand dominant, the hand going for the letter ‘h’ gets there first. It usually happens with the same pairs of letters.
It would not surprise me if keyboards have introduced whole new kinds of dyslexia.

I have noticed this has crept into my writing occasionally - if I have been typing a lot - usually with the same pairs of letters. I will write the second one first, and then go back and insert the first one.

I've noticed this a lot at my work and have narrowed down several common letter swaps to my system prioritizing one letter going first when both keys are hit at the same time. The one I run into most often is r coming before o when both are hit but it also happens with i before e or, in the instance you have noticed, g before h.

Does anyone else run two words together to make one word even though it's wrong, everytime?

I tend to spell the word I'm wanting to type wrong the same a lot. For example, I'll type "that" when I want to type "than".

It's an annoying habit.

yes, gti instead git... i even kept an

    alias gti=git

for a week, before turning into

    alias g=git

a good , fluid mechanical keyboard makes one more accurate. anything deviating from perfection will introduce errors though.

I still type badly after years of practice and trying to touch type. I just hit wrong keys quite often! I’ve quit caring.

Not always, I think. But maybe there are some where it is common to me, although I do not remember, so I don't know.

"langauge". And I'm a linguist, so I type this word a lot...

Practice typing. There is no other way. You just have an issue with accuracy and need to fix it.

In the case you mentioned, if you note, it's a case of the right hand hitting 'h' before the left is done hitting the t. Just practice typing for a bit everyday and these kind of errors will go away.

I type "grpe" instead of "grep" all the time.

yes,I frequently make typo while typing word ending with -re,to -er. I know the spelling. Still I make those errors and then correct those errors immediately.

I type `git pupll` an awful lot. No idea why.

alias gerp=grep

For just that reason

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