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> It’s difficult to type and think at the same time, so any time spent writing is a pause in thoughts, which can derail the flow. I'm a competitive typist. I'
by codefined 3y ago
> It’s difficult to type and think at the same time, so any time spent writing is a pause in thoughts, which can derail the flow.
I'm a competitive typist. I'm also a programmer. The main positive that I see is that typing no longer requires thought. I think of the code I want to write and it's transcripted onto the computer.
I would say that it's more advantageous to type _accurately_ than quickly. Typing competitions generally require 100% accuracy, which gives me a great amount of belief that what I'm typing is correct, without having to look at it / check it over and get side tracked from the code itself.
- jiveturkey 3y agoUntil now I thought I was a good typist. As I tried writing a rebuttal I realized that while I don't "think" the motions, I do have to think about each letter, what case to use, the actual spelling of the word. VS just thinking the thoughts. I did know a guy once who was one of our rockstar devs. While he was incredibly smart, I think his real superpower was how fast he typed. The words just appeared on the page. And if you were over his shoulder, his accuracy didn't decrease that much. When someone is watching me, I lose 50% accuracy.
- iteria 3y agoFor me typing is muscle memory. My fingers just do the thing necessary to produce words. I slow down to a crawl typing random strings of characters or new words/names because I don't actually know how to touch type I think. I just know what finger movements produce a word. It's kind of like how you don't think about how to ride a bike. It's just something you do in the same way that you don't manually breath although you could. Typing correctly when someone is watching us more about not not letting someone's possible judgment distract you. When you are manually typing, it's just not as fast.
- WesleyJohnson 3y agoMildly chuffed to see there is someone else out there like this; I'm the exact same way. I don't touch type properly, don't use home row, but type at a pretty decent clip when it's familiar - even code. Slow down quite a bit in new territory. What sometimes gets me though - I think one word, but type another. It's almost always the same starting letter or letters though. It's like the muscle memory kicks in, but takes the wrong fork in the road or something. Very odd.
- corytheboyd 3y agoThis happens to me all the time! “Thought” instead of “though” comes up often, but I know I’ll just type in completely different words than I meant to as well. I am always reading back anything I send a minute later, just to catch the silly mistakes and correct them. It is probably annoying for the people reading the newly-sent message, when it shifts around while they are reading it. Sorry!
- corytheboyd 3y agoOh yeah I can agree with the muscle memory of it. I often cannot remember little nuances of syntax when instructing others what to type, but it just comes out if I’m typing it. I often have to go start typing it in a scratch pad to double check myself hah! I also realize how much of what I use all the time is actually “ctrl-r <first few characters of commonly used one liner>” and have to go double check that when working with others. A blend of muscle memory and a search index of commands.
- sebastiennight 3y agoI tried to type your entire comment in my address bar as I was reading it to assess my own speed/process, and it's interesting that even though I didn't notice your typo > "us" more about not... I did type the same. So I did not really type what was in my head (my "inner voice" read "is"). Humans are weird.
- eichin 3y agoHeh, have you ever had someone ask you what keybinding did something, and you had to actually move your hand to recall it? (That may be more specifically a skilled-at-emacs thing, then entirely generic typing...)
- kccqzy 3y agoI feel this for my passwords. I can type my password without thinking about individual characters but if I need to recall it I'll have to move my hands.
- ewoodrich 3y agoAt work I was given a generated password (not my login password for context) of random words with numbers replacing/inserted at random points which I quickly memorized and used several times a day. After touch typing it through muscle memory for 6 or so months one day I misentered it a few times in a row, and I realized I had no idea what I actually had been typing the whole time (I knew the dictionary words, but the combination of numbers and where they appeared was the issue). Spent a while trying to zone out and let the muscle memory take over again but didn't work and finally gave up and asked for it to be reset. Very strange experience....
- kqr 3y agoRelatedly, I type both sides of matching pairs (parens, quotes, braces, etc.) and then left-arrow back into them to fill them with content. This is convenient to keep them balanced and because they are awkward to produce so I might as well do both in one motion. When people see it they sometimes ask me what keyboard shortcut that was, but no, I just typed them and backed into them.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoyep, and it's always hilarious.
- misja111 3y agoThis! It's almost like my fingers have a mind of their own. Occasionally this actually gets in the way, for instance I want to type 'own' but my fingers decide to type 'one'. Do you have this as well?
- iteria 3y agoI've done that. It's annoying lol
- jsweojtj 3y agoCan you expand a bit more about what you mean when you say you're a competitive typist? are these in person tournaments?
- codefined 3y agoYeah! Whilst usually a side show to real events there's a bunch of virtual and in person events. Two years there was an event in the UK dedicated to typing. Last year the US. Virtual tournaments happen frequently throughout the year. The most famous one is likely the yearly event hosted by Keymash[0]. Octahedron is also a famous player in the scene. He hosts a Discord server for proficient typists and regularly puts on events. [0] https://keymash.io/ https://keymash.io/
- JCharante 3y agoHow good is proficient? I just use a QWERTY keyword and my max is 143wpm, usually stable around 115wpm and after 10+ minutes of typing slows down to 100WPM. Is that proficient enough? Because I know of people who type at 200-300 WPM with their custom keyboards
- klyrs 3y agoDo people use steno keyboards for this (and why not)? The scores I'm seeing there are certainly impressive for ordinary keyboards but nothing close to the ridiculous records stenographers get.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agothat seems like it would be against the spirit of the competition. Like entering a car into a marathon.
- absoluteunit1 3y agoI’m curious, what platforms do you use for practice and what strategies/exercises do you do to improve your speed ?
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoTyperacer!
- absoluteunit1 3y agoIs it really only typeracer?
- immrammc 3y agoAnother one I like is monkeytype
- vlmutolo 3y agokeybr.com is my new favorite.
- aitchnyu 3y agoIts one of my top software role models. Minimal UI thats easy on the eyes and loads instantly, adaptive behavior thats ubobstrusive, really useful reports.
- dqv 3y agoWhen I start getting rusty, I fire up gtypist. It does key movement exercises (e.g. dedede dwdwdw dsdsds dadada) for many combinations of keys. It really helps. You do need to make sure you're following good typing practices however.
- amagasaki 3y agoIf anyone is interested - I have written https://typealong.app/ https://typealong.app/ because I wanted to combine reading with typing practice.
- mihalycsaba 3y agoI think of something and codeium fills in 10 lines of exactly what I wanted.
- lanstin 3y agoBefore I was able to get a job with computers, I had jobs as typists. I had one job typing (on paper with a typewriter) trust documents for banks. You had to produce the entire page without any errors, no whiteout or the ink-lifting correction stuff. It was more discipline than other typing jobs, but paid off. I also never think about typing unless I'm having to recreate emacs or vi commands on a weird touch-screen keyboard or that time I learned Dvorak for a while.
- pyuser583 3y agoLearning Vi really blew my mind in regards to typing. Suddenly keystrokes weren’t just characters, they were everything.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aardvarkr 3y agoI’m really curious, what is your keyboard of choice? If you could use just one keyboard for the next ten years what would you pick?
- WendyTheWillow 3y agoUndervalued skill! I think having access to quality typing skills enables a smoother interface to computers in general, which makes using them substantially more pleasant. I don't quite type as fast as I think, but as I type this, I'm considering my phrasing more than I'm considering how to put the phrasing into the text box, so I feel like I'm experiencing a slower version of what you're talking about.
- tsumnia 3y ago> access to quality typing skills enables a smoother interface to computers 100% agree! I actually studied the use of typing exercises in CS college students. Incidentally, the lowest performing students benefitted the most having those available.
- zerocrates 3y agoDo they "require" total accuracy in the sense that the penalty for a mistake (or the time spent fixing it) makes it impossible to do well, or is a mistake actually disqualifying?
- eichin 3y agoYeah, if the system I'm using has excessive latency (more of a 90s problem than today) precision means even when I do mistype, I'm "feeling" it and backspacing, not seeing them (since they haven't echoed yet.) It's definitely about getting to the point where you're not thinking about typing, you're thinking about words/sentences/lines of code (or higher.) I particularly noticed this when going from perl to python - in perl you were typing fewer characters, in python you could use more mainline english typing and not care that you were using more keystrokes...
- treyd 3y ago> if the system I'm using has excessive latency (more of a 90s problem than today) precision means even when I do mistype, I'm "feeling" it and backspacing, not seeing them (since they haven't echoed yet.) Perhaps I'm just overly sensitive but if the input latency from keypress to echoing is consciously perceptible then I consider that already unusably slow. I can't imagine using a setup like that regularly. Special case being something like a slow SSH connection, where I do have to just "feel" it and proactively correct mistakes, but I fortunately don't regularly have to connect to servers more than about 200 mi away.
- amatecha 3y agoyeah, I mean, when you get a certain adeptness at typing, you don't need to look at the keyboard OR the screen. I've answered verbal questions looking at the person, while finishing typing a sentence about something else (and used to do so pretty regularly when I worked in the office). The maximum tier is being able to backspace the correct number of characters back to the mistake.... hahah (not something I've really managed, that I can recall)
- kqr 3y agoCtrl-w or ctrl-backspace backspaces away the whole word and then you can just retype it. Often faster than trying to continue somewhere in the middle.
- aragonite 3y agoAs someone who has 100% accuracy, how do you avoid the kind of typos that result from incorrect finger synchronization, like 'teh'? These synchronization errors have been the main source of my typos, unlike the kind of typo caused by individual finger imprecision, like accidentally hitting 'p' when meaning to type 'o'. It occurs to me that because we use both hands, the way we type is inherently 'asynchronous'. For example, when trying to type('the'), the individual 'function calls', typechar('t'), typechar('h'), typechar('e') may be initiated (i.e. fingers begin moving towards their target keys) in that order, but there's no guarantee they are terminated (i.e. fingers hitting their target keys) in that order, because typechar('h') is performed with the right hand whereas typechar('e') is performed with left, so typechar('h') cannot "block" on typechar('e'). But if we were to make each typechar action wait for the previous one, it would be unacceptably slow as well. So it seems the only solution is to invest time in developing just the right muscle memory where everything is timed perfectly.
- dharmab 3y agoHow does a pianist hit the keys in the right order? By practicing pressing them in the right order, first slowly, then at the intended pace.
- kiba 3y agoSlow is smooth and smooth is fast.
- taway_6PplYu5 3y agoand speed is economy of motion
- appplication 3y agoIf this is true my fongrers are in a recession
- Karellen 3y agoSo... practice typing with a metronome?
- LoganDark 3y ago> The main positive that I see is that typing no longer requires thought. I think of the code I want to write and it's transcripted onto the computer. This. This is everything. Translating your thoughts to the computer efficiently is better than doing it quickly. It's not just for creating tons of code, it's for operating on your existing code without having to make space in your head for typing. Once typing happens automatically, your focus improves.
- jon-wood 3y agoThis is why I love vim style editors so much as well, because they more directly translate the act you want to perform with what you tell the editor to do. While someone who hasn't learned to use vim is scrolling around with arrow keys and holding down shift to select, or trying to point a cursor at the right place to double click I've entered the three characters ciw into my editor and its already deleted the current word, place my cursor at the beginning, and put me into insert mode to start typing the replacement. I wouldn't even say I'm a super proficient vim user, there are people who are way more immersed in it than I am and who can leap around files at phenomenal speeds, but even just the basics I know are a huge help in keeping in the flow of thinking about what I want to do rather than how I'm going to do it.
- sumtechguy 3y agoFor me vim is deadly as a touch typist. 'woops wrong mode oh dear what did I just do?! because I just typed in 30+ commands into vi'
- LoganDark 3y agoIsn't the goal of touch typing that you no longer have to look at the keyboard? So you can still be paying attention to the screen while typing, i.e. you're not going to type 30 commands before noticing that something is off.
- sumtechguy 3y ago
- rconti 3y agoThe accuracy argument gives me flashbacks to the days of talk/ntalk/whatever conversations as a teenager, over 2400bps modems, cross country. I distinctly remember realizing I made a typo 3 words ago, while the cursor was several lines up, and being able to quickly backspace, fix it, and continue typing. It was so satisfying to finish my thought, and then watch as the cursor spewed out the words, the typo, go back, correct the typo, and continue on perfectly. This happened all the time. My accuracy has only gotten worse as internet speeds have improved :)
- brantonb 3y agoIn high school, I took two semesters of typing on typewriters. For our tests, Mrs. Beck would take the correction ribbons out. There was no point in trying to fix anything, keep going as fast as possible. We went to a tri-county competition that used computers instead. I was the only one from my school that realized we could correct our mistakes during the competition. I sacrificed a bit of speed to get 100% accuracy and won the whole shebang. Mistakes were heavily penalized in the scoring.
- sumtechguy 3y agoThat is what usually dinged me on my speed, mistakes. I could hit easy 90+ but dings for mistakes it is more like 30-40.
- vishnugupta 3y ago> The main positive that I see is that typing no longer requires thought. I can't emphasise this enough. Whenever I see even experienced programmers searching for the right keys or trying to correct their mistakes I just feel sad for all the lost productivity. It's also about not using the subconscious muscle memory which means a good chunk of conscious mental bandwidth is getting wasted on repeated task that could otherwise have been used for programming/creativity etc., By a sequence of happy coincidences I got trained as a touch typist before I could go anywhere near a computer. On a real mechanical typewriter. So by the time I was learning programming I was focused solely on learning it as opposed to fighting the keyboard. The benefit of touch-typing can't be emphasised enough, if it were up to me I'd make touch typing a mandatory skill training course.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mike_hock 3y agoMaybe that's why I build reusable abstractions with a concise interface so I don't have to waste bandwidth on repetitive typing.
- xeromal 3y agoIf I'm being honest, if searching for keys is enough to effect my productivity where people notice, that company is not a place I want to work.
- sumtechguy 3y agoOne of the best programmers I ever worked with was hunt and peck. I told him learning to type was a godsend. He did not care and continued to crank out tons of code. It was just painful to watch someone that experienced having to search around for keys. He was fine with it though... I have the same mechanical background as you. It took me years to stop absolutely blasting the keys when typing though. It did speed up my word count doing that too. For me having to stop and look for a key is a jarring thing. Usually because every manufacture wants their 'own touch' on the keyboard. Laptops being the biggest offender of this.
- 3y ago
- capttruckerdave 3y agoI love typing - it just makes a little ping in my little lizard brain. But if one of my jr teammates are typing out every single character of their code I will slap their ass and teach them about autocomplete and github copilot. So much faster to have jr type their code (as in define the types) and leave the typing (as in the writing) to the editor. That still doesn't stop us from having typing (as in writing) races at the office which is a fun thing.
- junon 3y agoI'm a principal and do not use either of those things at all. You sound miserable to work with if I'd get a slap for that.
- badcppdev 3y agoDo you recommend that the junior staff you supervise use autocomplete and other code generation tools? Do you use an IDE with linting, etc?
- junon 3y agoI don't recommend them anything unless they're struggling with something. I would certainly never suggest copilot. The way I see it, they're juniors because they need guidance and to gain understanding. You cant do that with a computer writing code for you.
- geraldwhen 3y agoIf rephrase that as “use moments of inefficiency to teach juniors how to use their tools better” Showing someone how to use column edit, or macros, or automated method refactor, will change their productivity dramatically. It’s the role of leaders to teach and empower.
- junon 3y agoYes, that I agree with.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mfbx9da4 3y agoIt strikes me that touch typing prose is actually very different to coding due to all the symbols. Also unlike prose, a lot of time is spent editing or refactoring the code. How much would you say your typing competitions actually have an impact on your coding speed?
- bad_user 3y agoDon't forget there's a lot of prose in software development, too. You can always tell which people are comfortable writing their ideas down, versus those that don't, by how they express themselves in emails, issues, documentation, or comments in the code. Note that good IDEs help with punctuation, and you can touch-type those, too.
- marcos100 3y agoRewriting also costs less. Be it a typo or significant parts of a code. This allows you to try more things.
- ZeWaren 3y ago> The main positive that I see is that typing no longer requires thought. This is why I've been using keyboards with nothing written on the keys since 2004. At the time, I was in high school and had no money to buy a professional keyboard, so I spray painted my cheap keyboard with black paint (fun fact: I'm still using that very keyboard to type this). I've never looked at my keyboards ever since. I can type all letters and all symbols without thinking about it. As an IT person, I couldn't imagine how much brain energy I would waste if I were to look down and search for anything.
- seba_dos1 3y ago> The main positive that I see is that typing no longer requires thought. What I find the most interesting in how I type (never really trained, it just "happened" over years), is that often when I make a typo I'm already correcting it before I register it with conscious thought. It's like the hand already noticed that something went wrong, so the backspace keypress has been dispatched autonomously without having to think about it or even observe the result.
- etoulas 3y agoThat reminds me of Typing of the Dead https://store.steampowered.com/app/246580/The_Typing_of_The_Dead_Overkill/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/246580/The_Typing_of_The_... You can find downloads of the original game via Google.