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Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

> No, the bandwidth chokepoint is organizing thoughts, and those thoughts into sentences (or into code snippets).

Right, but particularly when writing, what "organizing thoughts" often looks like is writing a burst of text (a phrase or several sentences) then possibly editing it / deleting it / whatever. Being able to quickly bash out the bursts I think makes the whole process faster, or at least less annoying.

I switched from QWERTY to Colemak several years ago; I'm not sure I've gotten back up to my previous top typing speed, but it's certainly a lot more comfortable.

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I switched much earlier, I learned Dvorak as a way to make a clean break when learning touch typing. I set up a little printout next to the computer and just forced myself to try remembering the correct finger movement for the key, then look at the printout, but never look at the keyboard.

It took just a day or so of ordinary computer use to beat my non-touch-typing speed; and having learned also to touch type on QWERTY I can say Dvorak is more comfortable, and looks/feels more graceful, for whatever that's worth.

I had two one-semester typing classes in junior high school on QWERTY (with mechanical typewriters, no less), where I got up to 70 WPM on speed drills. Then in high school my mom got "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing", which got me up over 100 WPM on speed drills. A few years ago one of my friends introduced me to typeracer.com, where I consistently clocked between 110 and 120 WPM, still on QWERTY, on the default Dell keyboard that came with my workstation.

So I bought a mechanical keyboard and decided to switch to Colemak, which someone had mentioned on the site. But my numbers on typeracer still only hover around 100 typically, even after a few years of Colemak; presumably because I haven't been drilling the way I did when learning QWERTY. But my hands are certainly a lot more comfortable, and I'm pretty sure if I did drill I could surpass where I was before; so I don't regret the decision.

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