7 ms·

I also noticed smart people type really fast (if they can touch type) and can switch between multiple windows/tabs fast too. It's not because their fingers move

I also noticed smart people type really fast (if they can touch type) and can switch between multiple windows/tabs fast too. It's not because their fingers move faster than normal people, but because their mind moves smoothly so they can produce a long string of command with stopping to think. > as fast as any 20 year old. I I certainly hope so. Though I think it's more likely that Knuth can be as fast as other 20-year olds, but not as the 20-year old of himself.

klik99 4y ago
Interesting - I do this but I learned the skill from sight reading music scores - you have to be playing several bars behind what you’re reading so the skill is in going into autopilot with your fingers as you read. No small coincidence then that Knuth is an organist
- gumby 4y ago
  > No small coincidence then that Knuth is an organist Also great on the harpsichord and piano.
  - tartoran 4y ago
    Id love to listen to Knuth perform his instruments. Can this be found on youtube?
    - offByJuan 4y ago
      Just search Knuth organ on youtube an you get several hits
eichin 4y ago
As someone whose computing career was improved by learning to touch-type in grade school (Mom had been a secretary, saw that these "personal" computers had keyboards, and bludgeoned the high school to let me in to the summer-school typing class) it's not actually the speed that matters - though that does certainly impress people - it's that it's "automatic". If you're not thinking about letters and where they are, you aren't distracted from the entire sentence (or function) you're holding in your head - it just pours out through your hands into the machine. (Sometimes I joke about how my hands know emacs, not my brain - but if someone asks me what keys I hit for something, my fingers move and then I work backwards from that.) (And if you're collecting correlations - I have no musical performance talent at all and have spent maybe 10 hours total poking at musical keyboards - for me, typing is all typing, I expect musical keyboarding is a related but parallel thing, not the same thing.)
- phtrivier 4y ago
  There is however a terrible effect on productivity and self-respect when you have to switch keyboard layout for any reason. I'm still one month into switching to a macbook, and I now dread cutting and pasting. Oh, and typing "pipe", too. I wonder how long it will take my 40+ years old brain and hands to get their act together...
  - smugma 4y ago
    Even for MacBooks of the same generation, there’s a (significant, for me) hit when going from a US Mac keyboard to a UK one (enter key is all off).
    - porbelm 4y ago
      Switched to US layout on everything (because brackets and gt / lt are SO much more conveniently placed) and having to use an ISO keyboard now is just pain. My hands forgot.
    - _oyks 4y ago
      Had the same issue recently, with the caveat that I grew up in the UK, then moved to US and back. I prefer the concept of international standardisation to an American layout in pretty much all areas, with the exception of the keyboard layout; ANSI layouts are far more friendly - for programming, at least. Not just the enter key but the left shift too.
  - blueblob 4y ago
    I feel this in my soul. My work uses Mac and I'm not used to it. Fn and cmd keys block my reach for alt and control in my vim sessions and make it awkward to go through tabs in the browser with the keyboard.
    - serjester 4y ago
      Why not just use an external keyboard? I had the opposite problem until I bought a Magic Keyboard to use at work.
vario 4y ago
Google and Youtube often think I am a robot because of how fast I operate on their sites: typing, clicking, switching tabs etc..
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  I wish modern OS could keep up with my typing and window switching and app launching and ... I'm constantly perturbed and interrupted when some app window just 'hangs' for a few seconds (some garbage collection going on, probably?). I can't pinpoint any one thing, just... everything seems relatively slow in 2022 compared to, even 10 years ago, and certainly 20. Applications weren't always phoning home to check things during bootup, which I suspect happens a lot now. Our computers are dozens of times faster than in the 90s, and, computationally, some things get done much faster, but others - around UI, it seems - apparently regress.
  - lmpdev 4y ago
    This makes me wonder if real time operating systems might one day become popular as interfaces for powerusers
    - avar 4y ago
      Because power users tired of slow userspace will want their kernel to be slow too?
  - vario 4y ago
  - dachryn 4y ago
    there is a reason linux systems with i3 window managers are getting super popular these days. It's all about the instant response
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      I've been using i3 for years, there's just nothing that compares to a tiling window. If I'm in windows I use virtuawin with alt+1, alt+2, etc for switching desktops. Not nearly the same, but works so much better than the builtin crap Windows has. Paradoxically, I don't use alt+tab in windows to switch between programs. I used to do that, but then around XP (I think) they added the ability for programs to inject themselves into the alt+tab list. That means it's no longer completely consistent, which means I now have to think and check what alt+tab actually does so it stopped being any faster than just using the mouse. So now if I need to flip between them quickly I'll either put them on different monitors (I use 3) and/or put them on different desktops. The combination makes me effectively as productive without the use of alt+tab. And it feels similar-ish to i3, so it's a bit comfortable in that respect as well. NOTE: Anyone thinking virtuawin is like i3, it's not. It's just the best virtual desktop on windows (imo of course). Nothing on windows comes close to i3.
smugma 4y ago
One of the smartest people I met as an undergrad at Berkeley was a theoretical chemistry PhD student. He was an extremely slow typist, with mostly hunt and peck. It would be frustrating for me because it would be like 1/4 my comfortable speed (20 vs. 80 wpm?). But being slow there made him faster, because he’d spend a little more time before typing thinking about what to type.
- icambron 4y ago
  I’ve always had the opposite experience. When I am unable to type well I am massively less effective. This happened when switched from emacs to vim, or got a new keyboard with a weird layout, or broke my thumb, or, hell, anytime I use a phone. First there’s the cognitive overhead involved with the task itself, as opposed to letting your fingers do the work while you think about real stuff. Second, when you’re slow at typing, typing becomes the bottleneck more often, and your brain is sometimes idling waiting for your typing to catch up. Your brain has the hard part; it should always be the bottleneck. Third, typing fast gives you more options, because you don’t consider “how long will this take me to type out?” when considering different approaches to some immediate challenge. If opening a REPL and evaluating something is going to take you five minutes, you might not do it. I suspect your friend was a fast worker despite being a slow typist. If he learned to touch-type, he could always have spent the same time thinking as he does now then less time and effort actually typing it.
  - smugma 4y ago
    I understand what you're saying and often feel that way. I think one point to be taken away is not to judge capabilities of X (say, programming) based on Y (typing speed). However, sometimes I have the opposite desire. I can type on a normal keyboard at 80-90 wpm. On an iPhone I'm probably 1/4-1/3 of that. However, I probably spend 60-90 minutes a day reading/writing emails from my phone. Sometimes going slower allows you go to faster. > Your brain has the hard part; it should always be the bottleneck. Or maybe not. Lots of famous people (particularly physicists) talk about the importance of letting the mind wander i.e. the opposite of making sure it's the bottleneck. I'm a slow phone typist but it's still easy to do. My brain can still think of the next thing to write, or wander.

klik99 4y ago

Interesting - I do this but I learned the skill from sight reading music scores - you have to be playing several bars behind what you’re reading so the skill is in going into autopilot with your fingers as you read. No small coincidence then that Knuth is an organist

gumby 4y ago
> No small coincidence then that Knuth is an organist Also great on the harpsichord and piano.
- tartoran 4y ago
  Id love to listen to Knuth perform his instruments. Can this be found on youtube?
  - offByJuan 4y ago
    Just search Knuth organ on youtube an you get several hits

eichin 4y ago

As someone whose computing career was improved by learning to touch-type in grade school (Mom had been a secretary, saw that these "personal" computers had keyboards, and bludgeoned the high school to let me in to the summer-school typing class) it's not actually the speed that matters - though that does certainly impress people - it's that it's "automatic". If you're not thinking about letters and where they are, you aren't distracted from the entire sentence (or function) you're holding in your head - it just pours out through your hands into the machine. (Sometimes I joke about how my hands know emacs, not my brain - but if someone asks me what keys I hit for something, my fingers move and then I work backwards from that.) (And if you're collecting correlations - I have no musical performance talent at all and have spent maybe 10 hours total poking at musical keyboards - for me, typing is all typing, I expect musical keyboarding is a related but parallel thing, not the same thing.)

phtrivier 4y ago
There is however a terrible effect on productivity and self-respect when you have to switch keyboard layout for any reason. I'm still one month into switching to a macbook, and I now dread cutting and pasting. Oh, and typing "pipe", too. I wonder how long it will take my 40+ years old brain and hands to get their act together...
- smugma 4y ago
  Even for MacBooks of the same generation, there’s a (significant, for me) hit when going from a US Mac keyboard to a UK one (enter key is all off).
  - porbelm 4y ago
    Switched to US layout on everything (because brackets and gt / lt are SO much more conveniently placed) and having to use an ISO keyboard now is just pain. My hands forgot.
  - _oyks 4y ago
    Had the same issue recently, with the caveat that I grew up in the UK, then moved to US and back. I prefer the concept of international standardisation to an American layout in pretty much all areas, with the exception of the keyboard layout; ANSI layouts are far more friendly - for programming, at least. Not just the enter key but the left shift too.
- blueblob 4y ago
  I feel this in my soul. My work uses Mac and I'm not used to it. Fn and cmd keys block my reach for alt and control in my vim sessions and make it awkward to go through tabs in the browser with the keyboard.
  - serjester 4y ago
    Why not just use an external keyboard? I had the opposite problem until I bought a Magic Keyboard to use at work.

vario 4y ago

Google and Youtube often think I am a robot because of how fast I operate on their sites: typing, clicking, switching tabs etc..

mgkimsal 4y ago
I wish modern OS could keep up with my typing and window switching and app launching and ... I'm constantly perturbed and interrupted when some app window just 'hangs' for a few seconds (some garbage collection going on, probably?). I can't pinpoint any one thing, just... everything seems relatively slow in 2022 compared to, even 10 years ago, and certainly 20. Applications weren't always phoning home to check things during bootup, which I suspect happens a lot now. Our computers are dozens of times faster than in the 90s, and, computationally, some things get done much faster, but others - around UI, it seems - apparently regress.
- lmpdev 4y ago
  This makes me wonder if real time operating systems might one day become popular as interfaces for powerusers
  - avar 4y ago
    Because power users tired of slow userspace will want their kernel to be slow too?
- vario 4y ago
- dachryn 4y ago
  there is a reason linux systems with i3 window managers are getting super popular these days. It's all about the instant response
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    I've been using i3 for years, there's just nothing that compares to a tiling window. If I'm in windows I use virtuawin with alt+1, alt+2, etc for switching desktops. Not nearly the same, but works so much better than the builtin crap Windows has. Paradoxically, I don't use alt+tab in windows to switch between programs. I used to do that, but then around XP (I think) they added the ability for programs to inject themselves into the alt+tab list. That means it's no longer completely consistent, which means I now have to think and check what alt+tab actually does so it stopped being any faster than just using the mouse. So now if I need to flip between them quickly I'll either put them on different monitors (I use 3) and/or put them on different desktops. The combination makes me effectively as productive without the use of alt+tab. And it feels similar-ish to i3, so it's a bit comfortable in that respect as well. NOTE: Anyone thinking virtuawin is like i3, it's not. It's just the best virtual desktop on windows (imo of course). Nothing on windows comes close to i3.

smugma 4y ago

One of the smartest people I met as an undergrad at Berkeley was a theoretical chemistry PhD student. He was an extremely slow typist, with mostly hunt and peck. It would be frustrating for me because it would be like 1/4 my comfortable speed (20 vs. 80 wpm?). But being slow there made him faster, because he’d spend a little more time before typing thinking about what to type.

icambron 4y ago
I’ve always had the opposite experience. When I am unable to type well I am massively less effective. This happened when switched from emacs to vim, or got a new keyboard with a weird layout, or broke my thumb, or, hell, anytime I use a phone. First there’s the cognitive overhead involved with the task itself, as opposed to letting your fingers do the work while you think about real stuff. Second, when you’re slow at typing, typing becomes the bottleneck more often, and your brain is sometimes idling waiting for your typing to catch up. Your brain has the hard part; it should always be the bottleneck. Third, typing fast gives you more options, because you don’t consider “how long will this take me to type out?” when considering different approaches to some immediate challenge. If opening a REPL and evaluating something is going to take you five minutes, you might not do it. I suspect your friend was a fast worker despite being a slow typist. If he learned to touch-type, he could always have spent the same time thinking as he does now then less time and effort actually typing it.
- smugma 4y ago
  I understand what you're saying and often feel that way. I think one point to be taken away is not to judge capabilities of X (say, programming) based on Y (typing speed). However, sometimes I have the opposite desire. I can type on a normal keyboard at 80-90 wpm. On an iPhone I'm probably 1/4-1/3 of that. However, I probably spend 60-90 minutes a day reading/writing emails from my phone. Sometimes going slower allows you go to faster. > Your brain has the hard part; it should always be the bottleneck. Or maybe not. Lots of famous people (particularly physicists) talk about the importance of letting the mind wander i.e. the opposite of making sure it's the bottleneck. I'm a slow phone typist but it's still easy to do. My brain can still think of the next thing to write, or wander.