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Comment by dustinmoris | Hacker News Reader

> Since you expect to be be typing in a command line, moving your finger to touch the key is probably not very efficient.

Why is this not very efficient? Isn't moving my finger to touch the key equivalent to a single key stroke? How is a single key stroke less efficient then many key strokes?

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Admittedly I've never used Mac's implementation but I could see a slowdown if it takes longer for the fingerprint to register that it takes to type your password (which is probably the fastest combination of characters you can type)

If you're touch iding everything you normally password for, you can afford to have a less fast to type password.

From my experience it's much faster. Just the tiny fraction of a second that it takes me to look at my caps lock key to verify that it's not on takes longer than my fingerprint scan and at that point I haven't even typed a single letter yet :)

Also it's arguably not the fastest combination of characters I can type, because my password is not "test1234" and I don't get much opportunity to type it at all anymore since everything can be unlocked via TouchID except the terminal, or so I thought at least :)

> Just the tiny fraction of a second that it takes me to look at my caps lock key to verify that it's not on

I always just re-assign the caps-lock key to CTRL.

CTRL when used as a modifier, escape on its own

> it takes longer for the fingerprint to register than it takes to type your password

You mean the black void where there’s no feedback on how many characters you typed? I always have to write my password a couple of times to get it right.

Normally I can type my password faster than pretty much any other activity. But on my MBP (with the terrible keyboard) I never know if all of my keypresses registered (or if some of them were duplicated).

I think it depends a lot on how long your password is, as well.

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