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Comment by bobajeff | Hacker News Reader

Same here. I don't spend most of my time typing but rather thinking. So getting good at vim or getting faster at typing will not make me any better. That's not to say that I'm not in favor of being good at typing. I know my keyboard well enough to touch type also I know some keyboard short cuts specific to vscode but they are intuitive and have a GUI alternative if I don't feel like using them.

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I think everyone's got a different threshold for where returns start diminishing sharply. While I'm squarely in the "don't waste time micro-tweaking your editor" camp, there are some little bits of shortcuts and tooling that made me much more fluent at code-editing with very little investment. One example that stands out is the multi-cursor support that Sublime Text popularized (and which I use all the time in vscode now). It eliminates a good 80% of repetitive typing, or symbol refactoring that would have involved clunking through menus in old IDEs, and makes experimentation that much quicker. Feels fundamental, like copy/paste shortcuts which everyone knows now.

more than multi-cursor, recordable keyboard macros save me a ton of time. I miss them sorely in vscode

Yes, I tend on the side of only tweaking things when I realise I'm repetitively using the same context menus. That's the only point I learn the keyboard shortcuts, or map one, these days. I really haven't had to learn too many shortcuts. The best ones are multi-cursor editing like you've mentioned.

For me it depends upon the task.

If I have to hunt down a bug or have something with a lot of touch points, yeah, there's probably less typing and more thinking.

But if it's a new mostly self contained feature usually I think for a bit, then get to the point where I know what I need to build and the next step is about shitting out a mountain of code. Being able to go from nothing -> mountain in a fast time is useful.

One of my colleagues was using dvorak and arguing that because he types faster with it, he's a better programmer.

i never thought typing speed is all that important when you code. But he DID write crazy fast.

Typing fast is an interesting metric.

Shipping the same code will happen sooner if you have tooling and typing setup to allow for quick iterations, and being quick in making those iterations. Selecting a language/framework that might take more work can slow you down too.

Typing faster does seem to look towards thinking faster, trouble shooting faster.

One place where it can get someone into trouble is typing too fast, faster than it might take to think through and not over look something which might invalidate what you're doing.

I have all hires do typeracer.com. Not for a high or a low score, but seeing the development of the score and understanding the importance of typing fast relating to thinking fast.

Typing code inherently is slower than writing sentences, so if you can type faster sentences in written communication, typing code will be faster, even if it's not at the full typing speed.

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