> you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling) I was told I'd need to do that with typing. I started out two-finger h

> you must relearn correct technique from the beginning (actively get worse at bowling) I was told I'd need to do that with typing. I started out two-finger hunt-and-peck at age 7 on a TI 99/4A, and gradually added more fingers. Using my pinky for Shift, in particular, was a gateway to using my middle fingers for letters too. I didn't take any speed tests at the time, but retrospectively I'd guess I was around 8-10wpm. By the time I got to middle school and took a typing class with Mavis Beacon emphasizing home-row and stuff, I was already faster than the kids leaving the class from the previous semester, on the order of 20wpm. I did the exercises but I didn't really change my style much, and left the class typing roughly the way I started, but with more awareness of how I was "supposed" to do it. Feh. Then in high school, I learned about BBS's and modems, got my own modem, and found a local multi-line BBS with multi-user chat. And that created a heck of an incentive -- the faster I could type, the more I could participate in the present conversation rather than what happened 2 minutes ago. Social connection was thus linked to typing speed, and for a 9th-grader it's hard to find a more powerful motivator than that. I found myself adding fingers and breaking the 60wpm mark before the summer was out. No more hunting, still basically pecking, but pecking with 3 or 4 fingers on each hand. These days my typing style superficially resembles a home-row style; my wrists rarely move, but I perch over QWEF/QERG and JIO' rather than ASDF and JKL; like Mavis would've liked. I find the slightly higher perch gives me easier access to the symbols on the number keys and functions in the F-key row. I sit comfortably around 80wpm on plain text, and handily outrace home-row typists on code or anything with a lot of symbols. Moreover, the division between hands simply isn't. When typing with two hands, the letters in the middle, YGHVBN, are fair game for either hand. But if I have to reach for something, or if my right hand is on the mouse, I'll reposition my left to WRTH or thereabouts, and it feels perfectly natural to roam around the whole keyboard as needed. Thus my keybindings in games and CAD are probably horrifying to a home-row typist, but since I'm not wasting half my left hand's reach with tab/caps/shift, I have a lot more useful keys available to me in keyboard+mouse mode. I have CAD bindings from QAZ all the way to IKM, with only OPL off-limits. (And frankly, my left hand is on a SpacePilot half the time anyway. When I bounce it back to the keyboard, it's not required to settle into any particular home position, because the whole board "feels like home" for either hand.) I've never felt a desire to unlearn my evolved style and start over with home-row; I believe it to be demonstrably inferior for the sort of things I actually do.