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That's a pretty nice solution to a gripe I have with programming and typing. This year I've practiced touch typing for the first time in 10 years, and turns ou
by aljarry 3y ago
That's a pretty nice solution to a gripe I have with programming and typing.
This year I've practiced touch typing for the first time in 10 years, and turns out it's such a chore to use touch-typing while programming! My right hand has to constantly reposition to use brackets, parenthesis, and all the other non-alphanumeric glyphs (!, -,=, *, &), and I constantly make typos due faulty muscle memory. And I'm not even starting on how hard it is on my right pinky.
It almost feels like I'd need another touch marker for positioning my right hand to the right and one row up, to hit those brackets consistently.
Without touch typing it's even worse, as I often wrongly position my hand after hitting special characters.
Looks like modern programming languages were not created with humans writing on keyboards in mind.
Also, anecdote from series of software developer interviews: all candidates made typos while live coding. And I don't think stress is the only reason :)
- goosedragons 3y agoYeah, I can't use a regular keyboard for programming for very long anymore because symbols like {} just put too much strain on my right pinky. I use a kinesis advantage 2 and I've set those all up on the keypad layer on non-pinky keys and made the Delete key in the thumb cluster act as keypad shift. Works really well. I also put a JIS keyboard in my laptop and use one of the extra keys near space combined with the Linux program keyd to get effectively the same thing. Not quite as good but better than nothing.
- bbor 3y agoHmm what’s the alternative to touch typing? Are you saying that you look at your keyboard every time you create a bracket, or am i forgetting some middle ground?
- aljarry 3y agoI'm not looking at the keyboard, but I often move my right hand to click brackets or comma with index/middle finger. Takes muscle memory.