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Comment by prostoalex | Hacker News Reader

Why? What projects have slipped due to programmer's inability to type in all the necessary code on time?

I don't know, but typing that slowly means that there is a barrier between the thought and the deed. It like if you wrote a poem, then started speaking the letters one by one in Morse code --- and you refuse to learn Morse code so you have to look up each letter's code as you go.

My former coworker would use the mouse to copy and paste even 3-letter variable names rather than typing them in again. He'd also scroll his terminal window up and copy and paste old commands (again, all with the mouse) rather than using the up arrow, even after I told him about command line history and tab completion in case he didn't know, and would frequently mis-copy and miss the first letter off or have a stray $ at the front, causing him to start his mousing over from scratch rather than using the keyboard to correct it.

I am not the most patient of people and had to bite my tongue a few times when instructing him. I can understand being more comfortable with the mouse than keyboard shortcuts but programming is not the best profession for anyone keyboard-averse to that level.

Of course some people genuinely find the keyboard physically uncomfortable and there's no reason they couldn't still be excellent programmers - but it seems like it would impede the "flow".

A pointing device is often quicker than the keyboard without sufficient shortcuts, however, and this includes too many IDEs, including, for all practical purposes, every one you rarely use.

I'm not sure it makes a big difference. You're going to have to waste a HUGE amount of time doing things the inefficient way (whichever it is for the task at hand) before it will be the equal of arriving late for even just one day, or taking an extra 5 minutes at lunch.

Things I suspect you'd be better off getting good at than keyboard shortcuts:

* Regular expression search and replace

* The command line (default Windows command prompt is fine), and the POSIX-style command line tools (default Windows command line tools are NOT fine)

* Some kind of popular scripting-type language (perl/python/ruby/whatever/etc.), if you don't know one already

I like my keyboard shortcuts, but the above have saved me much, much more time over the years.

We must have worked with the same guy! This is a guy would literally right-click -> copy, right-click -> paste everything. It was so frustrating watching him do even the simplest of tasks.

Then there was the day when he had to merge a huge branch back in TFS. I try not to speak much of that day...

If typing is hard then you're less likely to go back over your code and correct typos and minor errors. At any rate, hunt-and-peck typists tend not to spend time going back over the code and formatting it nicely.

I think its more a question of needing to look at the keyboard and identify the keys you want to press. It breaks the developer's flow.

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