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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

when I watch proficient people using these editors I'm always amazed at what they can do, and they appear more productive than I am with VSCode

Editing text efficiently is not the same as being a productive developer. The bottleneck is rarely how fast you can type or edit the code; it's how fast you can reason about the code. When you watch a prerecorded video most of the time all the thinking has already happened, and you're watching someone just go through the motions of implementation.

Obviously editing faster is nice, but you'd probably find you just have bigger gaps for thinking rather than a sustained increase in output.

If you want to truly be more productive as dev, focus on learning mental tools for reasoning about code quicker. Learn to step away from the keyboard to think , work with others well, communicate your ideas, how to be more organized, how to understand what algorithms are doing, how to break down problems, etc.

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> The bottleneck is rarely how fast you can type or edit the code; it's how fast you can reason about the code.

This is sometimes true... and then sometimes it simply isn't. When I'm working on building something truly great and unique--and yes, I do try to spend my time building things that are truly great and unique as much as I can--I'm not spending most my time typing; but, we don't have the luxury of building things that are truly great and unique a lot of the time.

Sometimes, you need to write a debugger for some new architecture or a compiler for some new language or hell you just need to build some silly content management system for the billing backend of the new business you're putting together for the new mobile application video streaming pay-by-the-voice project you're working on, and suddenly you can see ahead of you days if not weeks of just having to type a bunch of stuff, because it isn't like we don't know how to write all of these things off the top of our head: they just don't exist off-the-shelf.

There have been multiple times in my life that I've managed to build something pretty amazing that got used--and even cherished--by millions of people that I only was willing to build because I was so sick that I couldn't bring myself to do anything "intelligent" and so dequeued a "spend a full week doing nothing but typing" project off the stack ("you win wars with lead bullets, not silver ones", yadda yadda etc. etc.).

(And hell: even when you are doing something hard, it isn't like you are able to fully pipeline your brain to be thinking of the hard things constantly while your hands are typing... I know I often find myself thinking for a while, figuring out what I need to do, and then having to rapidly type a bunch of stuff to build a new interface or refactor a project--during which time the language center of my brain is pretty actively engaged doing symbol manipulation--and only when I'm done with that burst can I go back to thinking. Or hell: I might have needed to finish typing that to run an experiment to learn something new so I could use the result of that typing in the next segment of thinking.)

Editing text efficiently is not the same as being a productive dev

That's like saying suturing dexterity does not a good surgeon make. Anything that reduces cognitive friction, including the ease with which keystrokes go from your brain to the screen, makes you a better dev.

I'd say vim wins the fewest-keystrokes battle. But emacs wins the war because it leads you to lisp, and lisp makes you a better programmer.

> The bottleneck is rarely how fast you can type or edit the code; it's how fast you can reason about the code.

That's the reason why I have been not learning to touch type for the last decade or so. I just have this strong feeling that it's my brain, not my fingers that is the bottleneck. At the same time, I somehow acknowledge that being able to touch type could in some still undefined way to me increase my productivity.

It looked naively obvious to me in the 9th grade of high school that I would crank out code faster if I could touch type. That and write messages faster on dial-up bulletin boards, and crank out essay homework faster also. I signed up for a keyboarding course. After one day though, I thought, WTF am I doing in this mindless class full of ditzes? I could learn this on my own. I promptly dropped out, switching to some other course. Sticking with my initiative to learn to type, I found a book of fprogressive typing exercises: a guide consisting of a sequence of rows: type this row, then go onto this one, ... instead of just typing a row, like the book required, I filled the screen with each exercise, and then some. The book, which I must have found in the public library, started with exercises using just asdf, and jkl; and so forth, adding more areas of the keyboard. I forced myself to look only at the screen, and not the fingers. Several days later, I had gone through the entire book and, whoa, I could type. I wasn't a great typist by any means, but I was "boostrapped". All my regular typing was now done with all fingers, without looking and thus all my regular computer activities now served as typing exercises, making me faster and more accurate.

Touch typing will increase your productivity because you will get your HN comments done in 10% of the time, leaving time for thinking about code. :)

Development isn't just coding. It's writing documentation (requirements, high level design, detailed design, reference manuals, ...), commit comments, bug reports, e-mails, status reports, ...

Poor keyboarding skills will definitely hold you back.

In order to reason about code, one thing you can do is write. Not write code, but prose about the subject matter. Writing is a thinking tool, and if you have good typing skills, the words pour out a lot faster, at times almost as fast as you can think.

I would recommend learning to touch type. The benefits are many. I can look at the screen or something else while typing. Typing requires essentially no conscious attention. I can just think more easily while typing.

I also got a job from it once, when the company boss saw me coding away and was impressed by my typing speed! Silly I know, but it did happen :)

Really doesn't take that long to learn, a few weeks or months of a small amount of daily practice would get you to enough proficiency to use it for real. I used Mavis Beacon I think, but that was a long time ago.

When I think about my coding skills today, I think I owe them primarily

- to languages: partly Java (OO), partly Prolog (declarative style), most importantly Clojure (FP)

- then Emacs

- then i3wm

Each of them "unlocked" something in my head.

Without Emacs I would write slower than I reason, as if I were rate limited

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