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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

That's a great point and something I've never thought about.

I think it's something that would be helpful to think about when I'm raising my kids.

I'm under 35 and consider myself very 'digitally native'. It wasn't until I helped my 19 year old niece set up her laptop that I realized exactly the same thing. They're fine with youtube and spotify from a tablet or phone. She could pick things up fairly quickly for school assignments (Office, etc.). I think it was her hunt-and-peck typing that made me realize my assumptions were off. (I don't think typing classes in middle and high school are much of a thing anymore in my region.)

Watching professionals hunt-and-peck all day drives me mad.

I took a 2 week typing class in the summer after 8th grade. We learned on big heavy mechanical typewriters where you really had to hammer the key to get an impression. It was time well spent, as it has paid off for me continuously ever since. For example, I wrote this entirely with touch typing (not looking at the keyboard).

I have occasionally thought to time to learn proper touch typing. But I never seem to get over the idea that my bottleneck is not in the fingers, but in the brain trying to figure what to type in the first place... Can someone prove me wrong and make me motivated to learn?

I'll assume you're a programmer. Have you ever been in a situation where your IDE, text editor, or other tools were extremely slow and unresponsive? You're trying to perform some task and there's this external bottleneck slowing down everything you are doing. Instead of completing the subtask quickly so that your train of thought flows smoothly into the next unit, the flow is interrupted by having to wait. And once you're out of the flow, there's mental effort required to get back into it. But if your tools present a constant bottleneck, then you are permanently stuck in this less efficient mental state. Essentially the bottlenecking tool becomes a part of your mental model, and that useless chunk of mental real-estate reduces what can be accomplished by the same mind unburdened by this useless detail.

But all of this goes just as much when a lack of typing skills is the constant bottleneck. If you can't type at the speed of thought, the quality and complexity of your thoughts suffer since a part of your working memory is consumed by the process of typing. This has real implications for what you're able to accomplish.

It's the same as any other higher-level skill: the faster you can perform the lower-level functions, the faster you can iterate.

Your medium of expression also influences the speed of your thought. You'll notice that people who speak for a living seem to be wittier than those who don't; they're able to form thoughts and translate them into expression very quickly. Typing/writing is already much slower than speaking, but its advantage is the ability to revise a thought before conveying it. If you're typing slowly, you're probably forming thoughts slower than someone who types quickly. Anecdotally, spending so much of my time communicating via keyboard stunted the development of my ability to express vocally, because it lowered the rate at which I had to generate and, internally revise, and expel thoughts. It would be even worse if I could not touch type.

That's my layman's take, anyway.

Touch typing really pays off when you're typing in things like notes. It literally doubles the speed because you can do it in one operation rather than two.

The touchscreens of today make touch typing impossible.

Also, with my laptop and its cramped, wretched keyboard, I use a full size bluetooth one (they are surprisingly hard to find) to touchtype on. I hate how every keyboard maker has to "innovate" by moving all the non-Qwerty keys around randomly.

This is what infuriates me so much about the new Mac portables...they clearly were designed by hunt-and-peck peons. Software "keys" that you have to look down to reliably hit, word suggestions (implying you should looking down at the keyboard instead of the screen, which is flat out wrong...) and scrolling emoji. Never mind the key failures...

I'm surprised you say this. I have no problem touch typing with one, or two thumbs on almost any phone displaying a qwerty keyboard after orienting myself to it.

I'm wondering if you have very specific muscle memory outputs for your fingers vs. an intuition of where each key is relative to each other. E.g., I'm typing this sentence with only my pointer and middle finger on my right hand. Would that cause a problem for you?

Find an alternative perspective like typing games.

I saw a lot of kids using caps lock to type capital letters, that is even more painful. Thankfully they quickly utilized the new knowledge about shift key, I like to think I changed the way they use computers, but who knows if they actually have the motivation to learn further.

Is this in the US? I thought absolutely everyone was taking typing.

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