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Kung Fu Typing

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46 pointsrevorad22 comments

The first 10 years of touch typing, I thought that writing in a language that had very long variable and method names was unpleasant, as the time it took to focus on writing code delayed my mind thinking about the code. I'm not sure when the final shift happened, but it is now nearly twenty years I have been typing, and my hands know where all the keys are. I have no idea which finger presses which key, because my mind is 100% not involved. A direct mental interface would certainly be a nice improvement though.

To anyone out there who is still hunting and pecking, do yourself a huge favor that will pay dividends over the years, force yourself to learn to touch type. It doesn't take long to at least get to the point where you don't have to look at the keyboard.

Hm. I use all my fingers, but the pinkies only hit Enter, Shift, and other modifier keys. But I learned to play piano before I learned to type, so it has been remarked that I type like someone would play the piano. I employ a lot of hand movement, and employ a lot of "hand rolls".

Not only can I maintain about 90 wpm normally, but I also don't suffer any RSI type symptoms. I think the downfall of touch typing is actually that it reduces the motion of your hands, so you find yourself making a lot more painful reaches. In piano playing, unless you are playing a big chord you don't stretch your fingers, you just move your hands so that you don't have to.

I think that I type similar to the way that you do.

I don't make my individual fingers move, instead I arrange my fingers into different patterns (repositioning my hands if needed) and then kind of execute the key sequence. It is weird and I don't really think about it but my fingers never return to the 'home keys'. (Normally they are already on the next key that they need to be on). (If i'm typing 'ere' my left-middle will stay on 'e', if i'm typing 'different' my left-middle will be on 'e' and left index will be on 'f' before i'm done typing 'i').

I think it has to do with being able to think a few of symbols ahead, as you would with music.

I'm probably > 90 wpm, as well, and no RSI.

Yeah, that sounds quite similar. A side effect of typing this way is that changing keyboard layouts didn't change my typing speed at all after I had learned the keys. Which annoyed me initially, because I was hoping for an easy way to increase speed.

Awesome graphics. I do touch typing with the home return, does that make me cybernetic? :P

@jessejmc I tried to switch to dvorak once. It's a very efficient layout, and I might have stuck to it if it weren't for the fact that I need to switch regularly between english and portuguese, and dvorak is not at all targetted to languages other than english.

It doesn't help that, between laptops and keyboards, I have pt, es, us and uk physical layouts... nowadays I find myself just customizing the keyboard layout to my needs - US international as base, then switch and add all the accents and symbols around to optimal places - that way I don't care much what's printed on the keyboard.

I wonder what that does to the pretty diagrams? :)

I typed with an index, middle, and ring finger style (+thumb for space) before devoting a few weeks to convert to full touch typing. I went from 50 wpm to 70 wpm.

That said, the only time I ever maintain 70 wpm is stream of consciousness writing. If I'm thinking about the words, the bottleneck isn't my typing speed.

On a semi-related note, a friend and I were talking about a switch from qwerty to dvorak. Has anyone that was a touch typist in one made the switch to the other? Thougts afterwards?

There was recently a long discussion here or on reddit/r/programming about dvorak vs qwerty. Did not seem to go in favor of dvorak.

Not surprised, dvorak is optimized for speed in pure text, and programming is not pure text, nor does it need a lot of speed most of the times, and the ()[]{};.$ symbols are the most important, which clashes with what the dvorak layout considers important.

I think few people work with the classic dvorak layout (the one with awkward punctuation characters).

Without arguing with anything you've said, how does any of that favour Qwerty?

I'm a Dvorak user, but I think it's a wash. Dvorak moves the [] and {} up a row beside the backspace key; but some compensation is that =/+ is moved down a row, and -/_ is moved down two rows. $ and () are in the same places. . is above the Qwerty D rather than below the L and ';', like reflection through the keyboard center-point.

I would point out that when using curly-brace languages, I never actually type either { or }. Instead, I use an editor macro that inserts the brace pair with appropriate indentation and leaves the cursor at an extra level of indentation in a new line between.

As a dvorak programmer, it just prompted me to write more python. If you're typing {} characters all day, you should consider how much semantic value that's adding to your programs vs. the cost to type them.

Other characters (',."<>) are clear wins on dvorak, and they contain considerably more semantic value than {} do in any language. ";" is also easier in dvorak.

The semi-colon is on the home row on qwerty.

Yea, but it's right pinky which is weaker for most people. By moving it you also gain the -_ being on the home row (which you type less than semi-colon while programming in syntax demanding languages)

Why then would dvorak put s there if it were difficult?

Sensibly most English punctuation is on the left hand along with the vowels on dvorak; which is easy to remember.

Dvorak is very well considered. The combos: qu, th, wh, ph feel really nice.

What amazes me is the fact that the keys are staggered on a computer; I'd expect them to be radial; with my fingers. It appears no one's ready for a radical departure from the typewriter layout. Let's see what happens with the ipad.

Yea, I'm 100% ready for touch screens to become a reality so I can start playing with more complicated keyboards. The idea of physical keys (even with a better layout like Dvorak) seems so antiquated when everything else we use on the computer is infinitely customizable.

I'm not sure exactly how optimized Dvorak is. There are far more sophisticated (computerized) ways to optimize keyboard layout now than there was back when the Dvorak layout was created.

Also, although those punctuation characters are indeed important (though I'd add '/', and '-' to your short-list), you probably type the alphabetic characters far more (just my guess, admittedly).

Eh, deciding ergonomics by a democracy of internet users is pointless (99% of them are probably just repeating things they read on the internet anyway).

Dvorak will reduce the amount of finger motion. Other claims require further proof, but it's fairly trivial to demonstrate that dvorak is better for your hands.

I switched from qwerty to dvorak about 10 years ago but I did it for RSI reasons rather than speed. I'm not sure if it was the dvorak that cured the RSI or the fact that the switch made me really slow for about 3 weeks.

Also I'm not sure if my speed was vastly increased or not - my dvorak is 75-80wpm on tests, but I didn't test my qwerty beforehand. For the first few months I think I was typing faster but I was also making more mistakes owing to the decreased movement required for each keypress causing letters to come out out-of-order. It took a while to get that under control.

One thing that does improve: you realise that remapping individual keys isn't a big deal, which is quite liberating. For example I've moved a bunch of punctuation keys about (e.g. parens) to make programming easier and more comfortable. It takes a couple of days to adapt per key.

Nice diagrams. Dvorak (and Colemak) please.

Thank goodness I took typing in high school. If you didn't, then get yourself a "typing tutor" program and practice, practice, practice. Amaze your friends with touch-typing prowess and vim muscle memory!

I don't do structured touch typing, I learned to read on a computer (early for my age, an old atari) and typing is more natural than writing. When I was in college, I used to do medical transcription and I peaked at about 120WPM with an acceptable error rate, I'd like to generate those diagrams myself... one thing is I'm much larger than average so one of my hands actually spans the keyboard, traditional touch typing rules just don't make much sense in my head.

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