Comment by souterrain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by souterrain | Hacker News Reader

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I never learned to type "properly", or, should I say, never completed learning. We were told very sternly in catholic school typing class not to fiddle with the IBM Selectric "golf ball" lest the typewriter malfunction and we be permanently removed from the class.

Being a curious and tinkering individual, I was presently kicked out of the class. (Insert here rant on rewarding curiosity in schools, rather than punishing it.)

Today I have a bizarre, hybrid typing style, somewhere near touch-typing with a lot of error correcting, and occasional hunt-and-peck. It's odd... the hunt-and-peck occurs more when I'm typing nonsense like passwords. Words (and quasi-words in code and the shell) seem to come out just fine.

That said, it's nice to see that even in my 40s, I can improve at something over time.

A lot of the improvements in my typing, I owe to returning to mechanical keyboards. (I think... this is completely unscientific.) First, I switched to a Das Keyboard Ultimate, without labeled keycaps. This really forced myself to get away from the crutch that was the labeled keys.

Lately, I've switched to a Kinesis Advantage 2 ergonomic keyboard. This has helped more with my hand positioning, which seems to have improved even going back to a "default keyboard" -- I've noticed that when traveling and using my laptop keyboard, my typing has also improved.

I will fully admit that in addition to attempting to improve my typing and treat/prevent RSI in a non-scientific manner, I bought these keyboards for the eccentric nerd factor. As one does.

I went a long time before learning to touch type properly. I had a fast-ish quasi touch / hunt and peck style I suspect similar to what you describe.

I ended up learning to touch type by 1) switching my keyboard to dvorak in software 2) printing a paper dvorak map that I taped just below my monitor (aside: a big surplus HP CRT with BNC connectors in those days) 3) Forcing myself to use only the correct finger to hit each key, then returning to rest in the home row.

This was back in college. I was a journalism major at the time, and so my inability to touch type had become a liability. It took me about a week of slow suffering before I was off to the races.

If RSI is a problem for you, you might consider training yourself to type on a dvorak layout. There are lots of claims about dvorak (some true and some hyperbole), but one thing that is absolutely true is that the amount of finger travel is much lower. Back when I learned dvorak, I actually measured finger stretch distances from the home row on my keyboard, and compared a corpus of my emails to figure how much travel would have been required in qwerty vs dvorak. Dvorak was substantially less.

There are theoretically better layouts than dvorak, but I think dvorak strikes a great balance between ergonomics and being available and easy to switch to on every operating system.

>There are theoretically better layouts than dvorak, but I think dvorak strikes a great balance between ergonomics and being available and easy to switch to on every operating system.

I disagree, and I'm a Dvorak typist. In any modern OS, Colemak at the least should be commonly available. Workman is a very good layout too, and should be pretty commonly available.

Dvorak's main advantage is that it's been around a long time, but it's not really the best layout IMO. One day I want to learn Workman as it seems to correct the flaws I see with Dvorak, and it should also (just like Colemak) be easier to learn for Qwerty typists than Dvorak.

It's a hard balance. Dvorak is vastly better than Qwerty and is ubiquitous. I have seen Colemak pretty commonly, and Workman once in a while. I don't doubt Workman might be marginally better than Dvorak, but I don't know if it's enough better for me to be the change that I want to see in the world.

Workman vs. Colemak probably isn't a huge gain. However, either of those have a huge advantage over Dvorak for someone who doesn't already know Dvorak and knows Qwerty, because they're just not that different from Qwerty the way Dvorak is. They also preserve the left-hand location of C, V, and X since those are so commonly used for cut-and-paste operations.

Again, this is coming from someone who's proficient in Dvorak, but not Colemak or Workman, but right now I would not recommend Dvorak to someone interested in trying an alternate layout; I'd point them to these newer alternatives instead.

I’ve considered Dvorak, but I’m very reluctant to make the investment in lost productivity while learning. I’m not certain my slow suffering would be limited to about a week.

My wife switched (she was already a touch typist) and it was only a few days of diminished productivity for her. I think I might have been the bad case :-)

> the hunt-and-peck occurs more when I'm typing nonsense like passwords

Actually one of the reasons password manages are recommended is that entering passwords is never as fast as typing normal words so it's easier to shoulder surf.

All my passwords use pronounceable combinations of letters, so I can type them as fast as my normal typing.

It has to do with mental grouping [0]. Words aren't a bag of letters, their order has a particular meaning. The mental overhead of "tbwvpcrwx" is 9 letters, while "WrtCdEvrydy" is, for me, 5 things: "w" "r" "t" "cd" "evrydy" (and I assume based on the capitalization, 3 things for you).

With regular use, your mind creates a mapping of "thing" to "keypresses". As long as a password remains a 9-thing bag of characters in your head, those 9 things will be slower to type than a 3-thing set of letters. But if you can create mental meaning from them, your password-typing speed will increase to where it's indistinguishable from normal words.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...

(Quick edit: "WrtCdEvrydy" just dropped to "3 things" for me right after posting, I now have "Wrt" in my head as the fake-word "wirt".)

Passwords really do need to die.

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