Hacker News Reader

> if typing speed ever becomes a bottleneck, something has gone horribly wrong somewhere.

I've never understood such reasoning. Typing speed is a bottleneck. It cannot be parallelized with other tasks, and therefore, is on the critical path. Improving typing speed will shorten task duration.

What is perhaps meant instead is that typing is not worth improving, because gains wouldn't affect overall task duration significantly. But then, why focus on percentage improvement over task duration? I use a keyboard all day. Any improvement affects my day-to-day quality of life for the rest of my life. Keypresses saved, finger, wrist, arm movements eliminated increases my comfort. Removing frictions in work increases flow.

I personally like not having to move around too much, but beyond CapsLock for Ctrl I’ve never stuck with anything fancy.

That said, I don’t understand how typing speed doesn’t matter - I agree that’s mostly the case for code, but everything in between, from documentation to Slack chats, I think faster than I type and I’m always open to performance improvements. It’s also great if you can context switch with as little friction as possible so that you can hit the ground running each time.

Overall it’s just about actions per second, not actual typing. I agree that IDEs and advanced editors help cut out a lot of stuff (I’ve never understood multiple cursors, for example, because as you say, that’s usually just a structured refactoring). But there are always opportunities to cut down cognitive load or speed up regular tasks. Whether hardware or software, we’re in tech because we believe better tools solve problems better.

> if typing speed ever becomes a bottleneck...

The issue isn't really speed, it's moving your hands away from the core of the keyboard. Touch typing means you don't have to think about getting text into your machine (or modifying it) -- it just happens.

Having to move your hand away to somewhere else (arrow keys or, shudder a mouse/trackpad) causes a microinterruption in your flow.

For me it was never about speed, it’s about comfort. I always unconsciously hated having to reach for the arrow keys all the way to the right of the keyboard to select words and move around.

A generation of Swedish programmers grew up on a cruel and unusual keyboard layout that's like

  ; is shift + , (1 step right of m)
  : is shift + . (2 steps right of m)
  - is where US layout has /
  _ is where US layout has ?
  shift + 6 = &
  shift + 7 = /
  shift + 8 = (
  shift + 9 = )
  right alt + 7 = {
  right alt + 8 = [
  right alt + 9 = ]
  right alt + 0 = }
  right alt + - = \

I invite anyone to try and press right alt + 7 and right alt + 9 on their keyboard. To make things more awkward, it must be the right alt key, it doesn't work with the left. This torture is every time you make a curly brace with this layout.

Same for German and Swiss layouts *sigh. After many years, I am now capable of typing curly and angular brackets by holding left shift with my small finger, left alt with my left thumb, and the corresponding symbol key with my right little finger, without loosing the ten-finger-stance on the keyboard.

(on our keyboards, left shift+alt is an alternative for the right "Alt Gr" key)

If you still can, I highly recommend switching to international.

The main benefit is, how much better default keyboard shortcuts in many Apps become.

Tab switching with CMD+{} and back/forward CMD+[] can be comfortably executed. There are no more inaccessible shortcuts such as Shift+CMD+? or changing playback speed on Youtube.

Specials are somewhat annoying to type with `alt+u aou` and `alt + s`, but nothing I couldn't get used to.

Spaniard here.

I've done it all my life. Maybe my pain tolerance is way higher?

Edit: I don't know what's wrong with pressing several keys at once to do something. It is like complaining that piano has no individual keys for all the possible chords. What's the alternative? Pressing a single key? What would you be doing with the rest of your fingers anyway?

I’m also Spanish, living in Germany: the Spanish keyboard is actually rather nice, with it it’s easy to type Spanish, German, French, Italian etc. without even changing the layout. It’s even easier to type French than on a French azerty keyboard, but that’s a particularly bad one.

The German and Swedish keyboards mentioned above are rather bad for programming (in the German case, even for typing ß/ss): they have AltGr combinations at the top row, the numbers 7, 8, 9, 0 for instance to get the brackets and braces {, [, ], }. In the Spanish keyboard they are right of P and Ñ (; in US-English) and those positions are much easier to reach while pressing AltGr.

In addition, in the Spanish keyboard the plain Latin letters are in the standard qwerty positions.

After having had to deal with some terrible keyboard layouts over the years I’ve come to appreciate the Spanish one very much. It’s clear that a lot of thought went into designing it.

The problem is that you need to press multiple keys with the same hand. Typically when touch-typing you press modifier keys with the other hand, to avoid having to move the hand in awkward ways, or typing with the left hand on the right side of the keyboard or some other weird solution.

On top of that, alt+7 is spectacularly awkward, as you need to curl one finger really aggressively and extend another to reach both keys.

Many of these keys are indeed accessible with a single keypress in US QWERTY. That, or a simple shift-combination. They're also much closer to the letter keys across the board.

The worst is tilde (~): right alt + ¨ (where US layout has ]), release both keys then press spacebar. If you hit any other key you apply the tilde modifier to it and end up with e.g. ñ.

` is a bit more ergonomic at shift + \, release, then spacebar. To get ``` you press shift + \ 6 times because ` luckily doesn't modify `.

I switched to qwerty US International years ago and I won't go back. Makes coding much easier. Even diacratics are easier with that layout than with my first language layout (for when I type literature and poetry).

Yeah I switch keyboard layout when I do programming. The US layout is so much better suited for the task that it's not even funny.

I use a southpaw keyboard with arrow keys on the left side. I think it's a great design, it frees up space for the mouse bringing your arms closer together for a more ergonomic position.

I'm not necessarily saying it's better but it makes you think about how input design shapes the use of software.

So, I use the Vim layer in IntelliJ. While it’s true that the IDE is doing a little bit of the repetitive typing work, there’s still things that are more comfortable with vim commands. To give an example you mentioned:

> Why are you doing all this typing? If you update a variable name or a method signature and the rest of the code doesn't automatically update itself as far as possible, why is this?

I use refactoring tools a ton! Rename Symbol works great. I’ll press the IDE combo for Refactor this (C-t) then the vim combo to, for example, add a suffix to the name that’s now highlighted by the IDE (wi SuffixNameHere<CR>)

It’s not like it’s hard to do that by clicking the end of the word with the cursor, or moving to it with the arrow keys. But it’s so much more comfy to me, once you have a few movements in your head you can precisely communicate “go THERE” to your editor which is worth it to me.

Bonus: @ macros! It’s so useful, even in IDEs, to be able to record (qx) and run (@x) a macro from your keyboard, while typing, if you notice that you’re repeating the same task. An IDE will help with renaming, removing, or re-signaturing… but not with the most annoying work, like numbering things or repeating blocks.

For me, not taking my hands off the keyboard (or more specifically, not touching the mouse) is less about speed, and more that it helps me remain focused on what I’m doing.

I was once IDE-ish, and now Vim-ish, so I think I can answer this a bit. Everything you say is true (I guess except for the typing a lot, I don't find renaming a variable to feel like more typing in an IDE vs. Vim, but you're right that there are some IDE features that make some things easier).

- The biggest problem I have with the IDE workflow is I was never able to get it to scale across projects effectively. E.g., lets say I want to make a find and replace for an API change across ten different projects, then run linters and compilation on all of them, and only be notified if there's an error, and otherwise make identical commits to all of the projects?

- Another issue, is how easy is it for me to take the problem I'm working on, extract it to a complete different context, and then more quickly iterate on finding a solution? E.g., it's common for me to take what I'm working on, in say JavaScript, that's part of a larger application, and then copy/paste the entire problem into a single file with a `#!/usr/bin/env node` shebang, and then do a 1. edit/save 2. run `./my_script.js` workflow until I find the solution. With IDE's, I've found they often don't like working with single files that aren't part of a particular project.

- When tracking down extremely difficult to find bugs, e.g., lets say you have several log files, thousands of lines long, and you want to use CLI tools to do custom analysis looking for patterns (e.g., is there a mismatch in order certain events firing in log files where the bug occurs vs. doesn't?). IDEs don't help much with this.

There's a pattern with the above examples that's the main problem I had with IDEs is that they aren't flexible enough to scale to atypical workflows/problems. All of the above examples also leverage the command line, which is clearly a pattern. The CLI is just a useful open-ended tool to help programmatically solve any problem you might be facing. IDEs are great if you're adding a feature to an application, but they're less great if you're looking to adapt your tools to a specialized workflow that's a better fit for the problem at hand.

Besides the above examples, I've also encountered code bases too large for JetBrains IDEs (rare, but they're out there), and generally find how slow they are to open windows to be disruptive to achieving flow state (I don't think this is normal, I think I personally experience latency more strongly than most other computer users, but just providing a complete picture). I also don't really find autocomplete very useful, which again is atypical, I use it in CLI-based editors like Vim/Emacs because it's trivial to add it with LSP support today, but would be fine working without it. Again it's about what you value, what I value is being able to adapt my tools to developing a specialized workflow to solve the problem at hand, over the features that IDEs offer.