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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

I code for more than two decades and I never learned to touch type. I tried for a bit but it didn't stick. I can't type in complete darkness but if I can see with the corner of my eye where the keyboard is I'm just hitting the keys.

Touch typing for coding felt awkward because there's a lot of special symbols that are kind of hard and unintuitive to make if you try to touch same keys all the time. Also I wiggle in my chair quite a bit and believe it's essential for healthy sitting. I feel like touch typing could interfere with my wiggling.

My style of typing is yet another factor why I get infuriated when I sit in front of a Macbook. For some reason Mac keyboard is about 3/4 of the key to the side of where I expect it to be (and literally every other keyboard is exactly where I expect).

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I am somewhat surprised how important fast typing seems to be for computer users, mainly developers.

It is never the typing that is my personal bottleneck. As a developer, I spend perhaps 99% of my time thinking of the problem, before actually writing the best and most concise solution. When writing reports or other academic papers, I first construct the sentences before writing them slowly while reading out loud.

I guess this is personal preference, but I think it is worth the time to type slowly, instead of letting the fingers do the thinking.

I'm not surprised, given the power of the CLI and the composibility of tools like grep, awk, sed, find, etc. IDEs are great, but sometimes what you need to do just isn't already defined in a GUI checkbox or menu item...

Even with CLI tools, you rarely spend most of your time typing, but rather looking at the output. Knowing how to modify and rerun previous commands is far more important for CLI fluency than typing speed. (things like ^r, !!, !*, etc...)

In fact, I have noticed that my default hand posistion has shifted to placing my left hand on the bottom left corner of the keyboard (thumb on logo-key, pinky on shift), because that is where I need it for shortcuts.

Sometimes I shift to a normal typing stance (such as making this comment), when I actually need to bang out a large amount of text, but that is the minority of what I need to do when programming.

To write good code, you need to write a lot of code that you throw away. Draft after draft. After a few such trials, the correct formulation of the code becomes apparent. Writing it right on the first try wouldn't have been possible. If one isn't a quick typist, there is more resistance involved in this writing and rewriting process, whereas for one that is, rewriting isn't as costly.

I learned the symbols last, simply started adding a couple to every password and after a year or so, viola.

Yeah, not too surprising given that typing speed is never the limiting factor for any programmer.

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