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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

How do people (especially programmers) actually type )_+={}\'"

I know the touch typing says they're all typed by pinky, but after so many years it still doesn't feel right for me. Why is the weakest finger in charge of so many keys?

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I have "Shift space" remapped to underscore as that was my biggest annoyance. The rest I've made peace with (though not ergonomic).

I guess, having just tried it, I use my pinky for []. But, it is not so bad, realistically the actions are

    Hit [type whatever goes in here, hit ]

So it isn’t really a repetitive action or limited by the rate at which I can hit brackets I think even for programmers who use weird punctuation, a file should still mostly not be punctuation.

I have written many scripts with succinct wording. There were absolutely more non-alphanumeric character. Try Perl, it's fun.

I mapped them to the row above the home row, in order of bendy complication. So it's {[<(/ for the left hand, and \)>]} for the right. I just hold them down for the punctuation instead of letters. So much easier, imo.

I have an Ergodox EZ setup with a layer switch under my left thumb to a code-symbols layer on my right hand, formatted kinda like numpad but for brackets and boolean math. It’s been a good way for me to eliminate a lot of pinky use

tbh when typing both together, I just shift my hand and press with my index and middle fingers. otherwise it's my pinky.

parens are third and fourth finger

=+ is my palm (weird keyboard I know)

[]{} I used a modifier key to put them on O and P directly below () (columnar keyboard)

-_ and \| are actually pinky

I don't feel like any particular finger is overloaded. Dvorak helps a lot with that IMHO.

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