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Comment by aikinai | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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?

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.

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".

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