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Comment by tomgp | Hacker News Reader

You see that bit at the start of the video where tom7 presses the capslock key, then types a letter, then presses the capslock key again? I worked with a designer (posessed of two hands and no visible impairments) who actually typed like that. Working alongside him was an excellent lesson in patience.

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Have a programmer friend who does the same. At first it really blew my mind and I couldn't tell if he was serious.

But he's a great coder and had loss of successful projects. It's just the way he learned and it doesn't seem limiting or annoying to him.

I did that up until about 5 years ago, and I've been a professional software engineer for 13 years or so, and programming longer than that. I had to remove the caps-lock key from my keyboard to force the behaviour out of my muscle memory.

Now though, I have the opposite bad habit, if I need to write a long string of uppercase letters, I don't turn on caps-lock, I instead keep my left little finger pressed on the shift key.

Is that a bad habit? I remapped my capslock key to escape years ago and never looked back.

Yes. It contributes to RSI. It's best to use thumbs for frequently used key modifiers.

I chuckled too but then I thought about it and.. it might be slightly slower but will probably be better for your hands long term since hitting shift you have to twist your hand awkwardly

...what? I just checked on three different keyboards to make sure, but...no. Shift overlaps with A for a reason; you shouldn't be twisting your hand if you're using proper typing technique.

on my laptop the shift is smaller than the caps-lock, about 2/3 the size of the caps-lock.

We're talking about 19th century typewriters here...

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