One CTO's quest to never type “the” again [video] | Hacker News Reader

One CTO's quest to never type “the” again [video]

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2 pointseschluntz4 comments

Hi! This is one of those rare side projects that I actually use super heavily :)

I also wrote a technical blog post about how I designed and implemented my 200 keyboard shortcuts: https://erikschluntz.com/software/2023/08/26/compressing-my-...

Using some typing shortcuts for common tasks sounds smart. If you frequently post a 30 minute meeting invite with a link and wanted to write that out as "m30" or something, hey that's a legit timesaver.

However, I think abbreviating simple words like "the" seems like a really tiny gain that doesn't make it worth the potential disadvantages.

I autogenerated all of these based on how many characters of typing they'd save me from looking at 6 months of data. I was also super surprised that abbreviating "the -> t" was actually top of the list even though it only saved 2 characters each time. I just type "the" tremendously more than longer phrases.

I understand the concept of saving the most characters. If you were designing some kind of compression algorithm or something, that's the variable that would matter the most.

But from a human perspective, I might be wrong about this, but it feels like there'd be a mental tax to typing this way in that you have to deliberately think about your typing too much rather than focusing on the words. I think it's nice to mostly focus on the words.

Even if you get to the point that typing that way is 100% automatic, I'm not sure that this is always a huge win. Imagine being out and about and needing to use a friend's computer for some tasks. All of a sudden, you've got the muscle memory of randomly compressing lots of common words where it doesn't work with the system you have to use. There's a reason almost everybody uses Qwerty keyboards despite there arguably being more efficient keyboard layouts possible.

That said, I'm not trying to dissuade you from doing whatever you want and if it works great for you more power to you.

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