Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitexploder | Hacker News Reader

That sort of blows my mind. How can you not learn to touch type? It will take you a month at most and it greatly improves life at a keyboard.

View on HN

To be honest, in programming, the speed of writing on keyboard itself isn't the most limiting factor during development. I've forced myself to learn to touch type (not fully, I don't press spacebar with a thumb of opposing hand as last letter written, I also almost exclusively use left shift), but that doesn't make me a fastest programmer around. Development looks more like "I type two words, I look at the screen for 10 seconds, I type one symbol, I look at the screens for 5 seconds, I type one word". Touch typing helps with that, but IMHO isn't really that important.

On the other hand, code is often not the only output. Tickets, design docs, bug repros, emails, wikis, user docs, etc. Touch typing can remove one source of friction there.

I (well, at least try to ;) think way longer about the text than I need to type it.

Probably, because most of the time when coding, you think, and do not type. Also you can do so much other stuff in a whole month. It might not really be worth it to spend a month on something, that improves speed of an activity, which is a small fraction of what you do while coding (perhaps it is!). Sure, if you do not plan to improve on other things, then that month might be well spent learning how to type faster/better/more precisely.

I tried to write this without looking at the keyboard, while usually I look every now and then. Worked quite well. I guess it is about forcing the habbit of reassuring yourself of pressing the correct keys to stop. I made lots of typos, but removing and writing again, I could get rid of them.

It won't take you a whole month. A simple way is to just use blank keys, and you'll naturally pick it up during the time you normally spend in front of the computer.

Depends on what you mean by "touch-type". I can type without looking in three keyboard layouts, but that comes through a lot of keyboard time (and a lot of Police Quest I), so that I'm unable to use split keyboards because my right hand is overreaching to the left half of the keyboard. I also ignore home-row dancing, specific finger positions etc. I can type fast and blind, but I don't think I would qualify as a classical touch-typist.

This is very much how I type as well. A couple of other factors for me:

1) I learned to type as a kid at the same time that I was getting into programming. So my typing style tends to optimize for quickly hitting numbers, operators, random punctuation characters, and editor movement/selection/command sequences every bit as much as ordinary letters. (And therefore, I tend to find obsessively staying near the home-row less useful.) I find that I type a little slower at pure linear prose, but a little faster at code than many classical touch-typist.

2) Since I was a self-taught typist who learned to type on a computer keyboard, rather than learned a formal touch typing method that was originally designed for typewriters, I've been comfortable since the beginning with backspace being available. It always used to annoy me whenever I had to take a typing class in school where they emphasized accuracy and dinged my typing speed an arbitrary constant amount for each typo. I can usually sense immediately by feel when I've hit the wrong key, smoothly hit backspace, hit the correct character, and then continue with almost no interruption to the flow of my typing. I usually don't even consciously think about those sorts of corrections.

You and I have the same instinctual feel when we've hit the wrong key. I can even hit backspace (or just arrow over) when I'm typing on a slow remote session and have made a mistake three words back.

Because not everyone has time to dedicate to a skill with diminishing returns after a certain point, and on top of that many people do not at all care about the life of their keyboard.

I touch-type, but still occasionally struggle with some things eg. using the right shift key instead of always preferring the left. I don't see much benefit in addressing this, since my typing speed is never the blocker with regard to my programming output.

I'm eternally grateful for Mrs. Walker's 2nd grade class, where they shoved us in a room full of Apple 2e's and made us play a typing game (and if you finished, you got to play Oregon Trail). I'm a bit surprised/disappointed that touch typing isn't universally taught in school.

Isn’t it distracting to have to look and visually think about the keyboard in the midst of working? Genuinely asking. I literally can’t imagine having to look at the keyboard. And how much of a commitment is it really?

It might be a bit distracting, depending on the person. Personally, I am still thinking about stuff and perhaps seeing the image on the screen or another one of some concept in my mind, when I check the keyboard. Sometimes it might even help to not look at that screen for a moment.

> It will take you a month at most

I always gave up after about a week, I've tried it twice or three times during the last 25 years. Like always, good (fast) enough beats perfection. And I'm a mathematician and programmer because I'm lazy :D

It’s just, I never considered so many people types this way and it’s one of those things that is hard to imagine doing when being used to something after 30 years (I’m 41, been typing since I was like 10 or 11), but I appreciate the logic in getting good enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com