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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

I taught himself how to type and was lucky enough to use a split keyboard for a while - really awesome for improving technique. My technique is probably somewhere between touch typing and "The Robot".

But the 110wpm rate is worth it. And people look funny when I blast away at the keyboard without a screen in sight (I often type on a bluetooth keyboard attached to either ipad or iphone)

edit: The funniest result of being a quick typist is that I use copy+paste less than I did a few years ago. Often the context switch between typing and selecting is too much work and it's quicker to just type things twice.

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> edit: The funniest result of being a quick typist is that I use copy+paste less than I did a few years ago. Often the context switch between typing and selecting is too much work and it's quicker to just type things twice.

Same for me, ish; I often find myself just using backspace and retyping the last few words if I find a typo a few words back, as opposed to reaching for the mouse and redoing just that word, or using the keys to go back. Going four words back is usually a matter of alt + left-left-left, alt-backspace, re-type, but still I find myself just deleting the last couple words and retyping it.

I used to do less copy-paste but since I got decent with vim it flows right into my typing. If you're not using it you should give it a try, with that kind of typing skill you could be insanely fast at editing too. (Has a learning hump at the beginning though.)

> My technique is probably somewhere between touch typing and "The Robot".

How do you learn "The Robot"?

You touch type without moving your fingers back to home row every time.

I especially do this with my index fingers who will often jump from, say, Y to U directly without hitting J in between. It looks very funny because they often hover above the keyboard because of this.

But I do tend to move my wrists too much when typing.

> I especially do this with my index fingers who will often jump from, say, Y to U directly without hitting J in between.

Oh. I don't know how common it is, but I just tried typing "yuuuuvawere" and noticed my fingers don't come back to home row unless I am done typing. They do sort of hover over it but there is no j between y and u. May be I am wrong, but touch typing doesn't teach to bring back the fingers to the home row after every letter. I learnt touch typing with some typing software which taught single letters, commonly occurring n-grams for n in (1, 3), commonly occurring words etc. So it might be my muscle memory that tells me that there is no need to go back to j if you are typing "you".

I learned to touch type with the home row thing, but I never find my fingers really going back to the home row, they just go to the next letter that needs to be typed. I guess with experience comes automatism, which in my case doesn't always involve going back to the home row after typing a letter. Or something.

I think it's quite common. I have seen friends type. And everyone who is commenting on this thread and touch types goes to home row only to take a break. There is no home row between two consecutive letters unless they involve letters on the home row.

Personally, I think I just have the keyboard layout more or less memorized in my head. I type about 80-100 wpm. I'll often hit the keys on the outside of the keyboard with different fingers on the fly and I dont pay attention to it. I'll put my hands on the home row, sort of, when I'm done typing something out, but my pinks usually go to shift and enter rather than 'a' and ';'

And now from 2 data points, I conclude touch typist generally have the fingers in the vicinity of the home row but don't necessarily touch the keys:)

If my pinky is at "shift", I don't feel the need to bring it back to 'a' unless I have to use it directly or indirectly. Same goes for other fingers.

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