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Comment by graue | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, for those who have typed gti, how do you type 'git'? For me, left index finger on G, right index on I, left middle on T. I'm wondering because I never make this particular typo, although I do have 'sl' installed and tend to see the steam locomotive once every few days.

As an experiment, I tried to type 'git init' very quickly a bunch of times and my typos were:

    git niti
    git niit
    git itnit
    giti nit

but never 'gti'.

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It happens with touch-typing. Left index finger for g and t, right middle for i. After pressing g, I move my left index finger over t while simultaneously moving my right middle finger over i. It isn't very probable, but sometimes the index finger gets to the t juuust before I press i, so I get gti, instead of git.

Left middle on T, on a querty-based keyboard? And you've never broken anything? :-)

[1] has what seems to be the classic way, with t and even r being typed my the index finger.

[1] http://www.powertyping.com/qwerty.html

Wow, this could hardly be more different from how I type. I use only my middle and index fingers for all letters, moving them around as needed. I use left middle on 't' unless the next or previous letter is 'q', 'w', 'e', 'a' or 's', in which case I use left index for the 't'. It's not at all conscious, so I had to do some experimenting to figure that out.

I type very similarly, although I also tend to keep my arms angled in with index fingers on v and n, and do use ring fingers to type some letters, and pinky for modifiers. The main reason is to keep my wrists at a more comfortable angle. There is some overall greater movement of the hands vs. normal technique. I don't really see a problem with this.

I pretty much learned to type at a reasonable speed from MUDs, IRC, and other online chat. I'm >80wpm even using this nonstandard technique on QWERTY.

I type like this mainly on apple mba13/mbp keyboards (low travel, small); on a full-sized Das Keyboard at my desk, it's closer to conventional typing, although I still never hit a or l with pinky.

I've got a very similar style, using just my two index fingers for nearly everything (except from e.g. my left middle finger for Q and A, and my right thumb for space).

Like you say, it's not at all conscious. I think it's probably because I taught myself to type at a very young age, and never thought to do it any differently.

Impressive. I have no idea how you could manage that.

Where did you learn your style? (Or why?)

I can't speak how for graue, but I can offer my experience since I type almost the same way as graue does, except that I do use my ring fingers occasionally (mostly right ring finger, for stuff like "L") and my pinky for stuff like right shift and enter.

How and why? I started messing around with programming when I was a kid and I never learned typing or trained for it formally. When I started, I was just pecking with my index fingers, but since my mom and dad used a typewriter for their stuff, I was fully aware that pecking was suboptimal. They never offered any practical help with that, probably because they knew that I couldn't care less about how I type, as long as I could crank out my code. Long story short: I've developed my own technique, spontaneously. I'm aware that it's probably suboptimal, but it's good enough for me and I can't be bothered to retrain when there's so much more interesting stuff to do ;)

I have an interesting way of typing based on what I did as a kid too. Due to the large amounts of games I played, my left hand stays firmly over the wasd keys and my right hand moves a lot more than my left. I tend to type really loud and mostly use my index fingers, but also switch to using various other fingers when I'm typing quickly. I know its sub optimal, but I hit 80 wpm pretty consistently.

I've just tested a couple different ways

usually it's left-index, right-middle, left-index, but sometimes it's left-index, right-middle, left-middle. It seems to depend on what I'm going to type next, but I don't seem to have a lot of insight as to what my fingers are doing (or why) ;)

I would guess you did this test on your own keyboard, which you're used to. I wonder if the results would have been different if you'd used an unfamiliar one.

(I also wonder if the number of trials you did was statistically significant--but never mind!)

I just tried the same and had a very hard time typing gti. I had to slow down to get it; if I try to type it as quickly as possible I end up with either "git" or "gir". The parallization between hands just makes it too easy to type correctly. While your left pointer finger is making that long move from g to t, your right middle finger is already done pressing i.

I never type "sl" either.

I was thinking along the same line.

When you use the same finger to type the G and T and a different finger to type I, it seems really impossible for me to accidentally type G-T-I.

The more common mistake is when you have to type two consecutive letters with the same finger but end up typing the next one earlier because its on a different finger (usually on the opposing hand).

Ex: 'teh' instead of 'the'- T,H with left index finger. E with left middle finger.

I also almost never type 'sl' though I do often type 'qw' in the Vim command line instead of 'wq'

A even more challenging task (at least for me) is to type a lower case letter after a symbol that requires Shift.

For example, I frequently type :Wq instead of :wq, especially in a SSH session, which adds some latency to the release of Shift key.

EDIT: SSH has nothing to do with this. It's just an emotional impact on the extra hassles of backspacing with latency.

I do this all the time too, but I think you're wrong about the ssh difference.

ssh doesn't see the keystroke until it's fully formed by your OS and/or window manager, so there can be no latency to the release of shift.

Thanks for telling me that! I realized that I can make the same mistakes locally with comparable frequency. Perhaps it's just that I feel annoyed when I have to backspace with latency.

Use mosh instead: http://mosh.mit.edu/

It predicts what the server will do with your input and displays the result (with an underline) until the server responds. This means typing is always at local speed even if the network is being flaky.

Happens to me even when working directly in Vim on my local system. Earlier I used to map "Tabnew" to "tabnew" and other such hacks.

Then I saw this trick that saved me considerable grief:

    noremap ; :

Now, just hit ; in normal mode to get the command line.

Same here! It's true even if it's a capital letter. Like "HEllo", "BEst REgards", "THanks"...

About "git", for me left-index, right-middle, left-middle.

I do right index finger on G, left index on I, right middle on T.

Oh, I'm a dvorak user, by the way. :)

Left index, right middle, left index.

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