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Comment by jiveturkey | Hacker News Reader

Until now I thought I was a good typist. As I tried writing a rebuttal I realized that while I don't "think" the motions, I do have to think about each letter, what case to use, the actual spelling of the word. VS just thinking the thoughts.

I did know a guy once who was one of our rockstar devs. While he was incredibly smart, I think his real superpower was how fast he typed. The words just appeared on the page. And if you were over his shoulder, his accuracy didn't decrease that much. When someone is watching me, I lose 50% accuracy.

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For me typing is muscle memory. My fingers just do the thing necessary to produce words. I slow down to a crawl typing random strings of characters or new words/names because I don't actually know how to touch type I think. I just know what finger movements produce a word. It's kind of like how you don't think about how to ride a bike. It's just something you do in the same way that you don't manually breath although you could.

Typing correctly when someone is watching us more about not not letting someone's possible judgment distract you. When you are manually typing, it's just not as fast.

Mildly chuffed to see there is someone else out there like this; I'm the exact same way. I don't touch type properly, don't use home row, but type at a pretty decent clip when it's familiar - even code. Slow down quite a bit in new territory.

What sometimes gets me though - I think one word, but type another. It's almost always the same starting letter or letters though. It's like the muscle memory kicks in, but takes the wrong fork in the road or something. Very odd.

This happens to me all the time! “Thought” instead of “though” comes up often, but I know I’ll just type in completely different words than I meant to as well. I am always reading back anything I send a minute later, just to catch the silly mistakes and correct them. It is probably annoying for the people reading the newly-sent message, when it shifts around while they are reading it. Sorry!

Oh yeah I can agree with the muscle memory of it. I often cannot remember little nuances of syntax when instructing others what to type, but it just comes out if I’m typing it. I often have to go start typing it in a scratch pad to double check myself hah!

I also realize how much of what I use all the time is actually “ctrl-r <first few characters of commonly used one liner>” and have to go double check that when working with others. A blend of muscle memory and a search index of commands.

I tried to type your entire comment in my address bar as I was reading it to assess my own speed/process, and it's interesting that even though I didn't notice your typo

> "us" more about not...

I did type the same. So I did not really type what was in my head (my "inner voice" read "is").

Humans are weird.

Heh, have you ever had someone ask you what keybinding did something, and you had to actually move your hand to recall it? (That may be more specifically a skilled-at-emacs thing, then entirely generic typing...)

I feel this for my passwords. I can type my password without thinking about individual characters but if I need to recall it I'll have to move my hands.

At work I was given a generated password (not my login password for context) of random words with numbers replacing/inserted at random points which I quickly memorized and used several times a day.

After touch typing it through muscle memory for 6 or so months one day I misentered it a few times in a row, and I realized I had no idea what I actually had been typing the whole time (I knew the dictionary words, but the combination of numbers and where they appeared was the issue). Spent a while trying to zone out and let the muscle memory take over again but didn't work and finally gave up and asked for it to be reset.

Very strange experience....

Relatedly, I type both sides of matching pairs (parens, quotes, braces, etc.) and then left-arrow back into them to fill them with content. This is convenient to keep them balanced and because they are awkward to produce so I might as well do both in one motion.

When people see it they sometimes ask me what keyboard shortcut that was, but no, I just typed them and backed into them.

yep, and it's always hilarious.

This! It's almost like my fingers have a mind of their own. Occasionally this actually gets in the way, for instance I want to type 'own' but my fingers decide to type 'one'. Do you have this as well?

I've done that. It's annoying lol

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