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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

Interesting thing that I've noticed--not all programmers are touch-typists, but almost all serious gamers are.

Yes!

And my method of touch typing shows that. My left pinky is ready for the special keys, unused for much of the typing, usually curled toward ctrl. My left hand resting position is on ASD, ready to press W at any time. My left thumb will always be resting on spacebar.

Hah! That's almost exactly how I do that, especially the spacebar bit. :)

Actually this tutor made me realise that I use my index fingers for ~90% of the keys, middle finger for the rest of the alphabetic keys and don't use my ring fingers at all when I type "naturally".

I find the proscribed touch-typing method of using all the fingers I found painful after a few minutes.

I found the same.

I think it's an exceedingly small number of programmers that can't touch-type. I mean, you're really in the wrong line of work if you can't do it.

I've met exactly one hunt and peck programmer, and I mean like agonizingly slow hunt and peck. Suddenly his lack of productivity made sense to me.

This comment really irks me the wrong way, and actually pisses me off a bit.

I'm a dev and cannot touch type. 2/3 of the team here can't touch type properly either it seems.

Seems I should quit my job then?

In a test I just took I averaged 86 words per minute, that's using just my index, middle and third fingers and occasionally looking down at the keyboard.

I don't position my fingers along the home row, because doing so just leads me to type at a snails pace and consistently make mistakes.

I've tried to practice it and I just don't improve. Luckily programming aptitude has fuck all to do with how fast you can type.

Depends on what your your qualifications are for a touch typist. There's a considerable distance between hunt and peck and someone who never looks down.

I can touch type for stretches because I learned the location of the keys organically -- but I've never had (good) formal lessons and have to type a lot of punctuation which is two rows above my fingers -- so I move my hands a lot[1], don't make use of the fixed position on the home row at all, and I end up looking down way more than I probably should (usually at the starting point).

I do about 30-40 wpm on the website above[2] :) Which is way slower than someone I would call a true touch typist, but not slow enough to impede anything but raw transcription.

[1] I have no real evidence, but I think this tendency to move my hand instead of reaching with my finger has let me avoid the repetitive strain syndromes associated with typing, as well. (It could be just that I take minibreaks every 30 seconds to look down :-) :-P)

[2] If I try to do it the classic way.. it's 10 :-P

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