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Comment by byteface | Hacker News Reader

when my missus goes to bed. i can still game without a backlit keyboard. you can't.

I can. My point is that I can do it without having been explicitly taught touch typing. It's just a skill I developed over time and I thought that it happened for everyone else too.

So you feel for the 'home keys' instincitvely without looking? every time you type? and never had a single lesson?

I've never had lessons, I have no concept of home keys (just had to look up what they are), I type everything without ever looking at my keyboard at a reasonable speed.

Yes.

that was my point. the two little lumps on 'f' and 'j' are so you know where to put your pointer fingers in the dark. touch typers feel for them so they can type without looking. It's cool that you can just do that, without knowing, over time.

To be fair, as someone who is similar in not using touch typing (but hits high wpm), new keyboards do throw me a little bit, and it takes me 10-30 minutes on one to get my error rate back down to negligible. That said, I instinctively know when I have typed an error, even on a new keyboard, and so am already moving to hit backspace before my brain even goes "oops, wait, you made a mistake", so the new keyboard is really just slowing me down rather than leading to bad output.

Isn't this a thing that naturally happens over time? I've never heard of anyone taking typing lessons, even among programmers.

I don't use the home keys, I just know where the keys are. I type with my first three fingers and use the pinky for Shift and Ctrl. I can do 120 wpm and am very accurate at it.

When I don't touch-type. I learned touch-typing years ago and use that too when I'm at my ortho keyboard, but I'm much slower and less accurate than my home brew technique.

I don't think this is very unusual for people who spend a lot of time typing.

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