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Comment by GertG | Hacker News Reader

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.

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 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.

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