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Comment by codeknight11 | Hacker News Reader

More people need to realise this and be cautious of such fads. I got caught up into the whole touch-typing hype and continued typing in that awkward posture for 3 months straight more than 12 hours a day and didn't stop even when my hands, shoulders and neck started hurting due to the awkward posture that's caused by touch-typing.

I am in the worst pain of my life right now. Absolutely regret it. Sure the error rate is slightly higher and you type slower. Atleast you won't be f*cked with RSI.

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I’m really confused by this whole thread and just want to clarify. “Touch typing” just means typing “correctly” right? As in with your fingers on the home row and reaching to type fluently?

Honest question, how is it that there’s debate about this and comments from people (on Hacker News in particular) about intentionally learning it recently? Maybe I just haven’t noticed, but I feel like everyone I know below a certain (not even very young) age knows how to touch type, even if they’re not particularly tech savvy.

Regarding this parent in particular, are you saying that hunting and pecking is better and typing from the home row is a fad?

There is touch typing and correct touch typing. "Home row" and friends is the latter. I'm typing pretty fast with all ten fingers in both German and Russian layouts, however, I've never became friends with classical touch typing. This circumstance make using split keyboards impossible for me, since I tend to cover more of the keyboard with my right hand than considered "correct".

> I’m really confused by this whole thread and just want to clarify. “Touch typing” just means typing “correctly” right? As in with your fingers on the home row and reaching to type fluently?

Yeah, "touch-typing" is incorrectly used to refer to home-row touch-typing by people who hadn't learned another style.

I use a totally different one, with my left hand resting on roughly shift-a-w-d and my right on j-i-o-; which requires little to no twisting to reach every key. I think I'm also more likely to lift my hands than home-row typists I've seen - those keys are just resting positions between typing bursts, not actually where I move my fingers back to while typing. The whole thing is based on the edges of the keyboard, rather than the nubs on the f and j keys.

I think there's a spectrum between grandma-style hunt and peck typing and perfect touchtyping, and I think many of us are somewhere in between. If you haven't specifically learned 10-finger touch typing, that's probably not what you're doing.

My typing certainly isn't Correct(TM), but some combination of muscle memory and bad habits formed over 30 years.

Yeah like what @encom mentioned below. I don't know about others but for me* it was a complete disaster. Your hands are always in one place. The posture is very similar to the posture that is required when lifting a single dumbbell with both hands. Hands are side-by-side and your hands sort of form a triangle. This posture also causes shoulders to hunch forward to make up for the hands stuck close together.

Sure. It might work really well for everyone. Not for me. I am going back to normal typing once I heal. It wasn't really that bad. Just a few errors here and there and slightly slower typing.

I don't understand how touch-typing forces an awkward posture. I had a self-taught typing style for something like 10 years before switching to touch-typing about 4 years ago. I'm just as capable of slouching, leaning, raising, and lowering my posture like I did before. I started getting pain in my shoulders and neck but that was from pushing my hands together on a tiny keyboard. As soon as I switched to a split keyboard, all of that went away.

Split keyboard, that's the key word. Solves multiple problems you mentioned in the first part of the post.

Just because someone says 'you will get RST when you do x' doesn't mean its true.

I'm touch typing now for over 18 years, quite fast, basically started with touch typing and i don't have issues.

There are plenty of alternative keyboards out there which will allow you to keep touch typing = fast and more ergonomic.

Alone the fact, that you need to look down to find your keys is weird to me. How do you correct your text while typing? Looking up and down all the time?

Personally I never have any issue with using keyboard. It's the excessive usage of mouse that is detrimental for my (right) hand (not just the wrist, the fingers hurt more from clicking and using scroll wheel too much.)

I got slight issues with my trackpad. I have not figured out a proper pattern though.

It is still rare.

If you have bad posture working at a computer, that's something you have to fix on its own. How you type has nothing to do with it.

Look into voice coding. It's a usable substitute & getting better very quickly.

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