Ask HN: Should I force myself to touch type?

5 points by MegaLeon 9 years ago | 9 comments

Most of my daily activity revolves around coding, whether for work or for personal projects.

Thing is, I have never received a formal programming education and my typing style is very "improvised" - whatever my hands got used to while growing up using a PC - I only use my index finger on the right hand, and three fingers on the left hand.

Work gets done comfortable fast, but I wonder whether I should try and force myself to learn how to touch type properly. I tried giving it a shot for a while and if I choose to commit to it I can see myself having to go through lots of frustration due to slowness and clunkyness as my hands re-learn how to type.

Has anyone gone through a similar process?

sillysaurus3 9 years ago |

Yes. If you don't do it now, you might not do it at all. Old habits are hard to break.

Here's a data point: https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-are-typists-first-programme...

So if you can do http://www.typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed.php and get ~84wpm, you're at least as good as Jeff Atwood. But rather than compare yourself to others, it might be more helpful to ask yourself what your goals are.

I guess I feel strongly on this because of how revelatory and interesting the process of learning Vim was. It was sort of like re-discovering typing, and took a week of solid commitment (during which I got hardly anything done). But it'd be kind of silly to say that any of this stuff matters, per se. If you can enter text and you're comfortable with your speed, the only question that would seem to matter is: do you want to do it?

taylodl 9 years ago |

Yes.

By learning to touch type you can keep your eyes focused on what you're writing rather than split between the screen and keyboard. I learned to touch type in my mid twenties. A friend convinced me of the benefits. He swore that I would lose productivity for only a couple of weeks. He was right. For the first 2-3 weeks I could not type as fast and had to force myself to not revert to my old ways. Which was really hard. But it paid off. Now I type and never look at the keyboard, staying fully focused on the code/text I'm producing. Highly recommend it.

Broken_Hippo 9 years ago |

I've seen folks type reasonably fast without knowing touch typing. Then again, I've always considered myself lucky that I learned this back in the late 80's in school. To me the main benefit is that I can usually type without looking at the keyboard most of the time. I'm guessing more than half of my keyboard glances now are finding things that are different on the Norwegian keyboard than was on American ones, but most folks aren't going to have that issue. I actually type slower if i'm using one hand, a few fingers, or if I'm looking at the keybaord.

As far as should you? Well, really personal preference. After some time, it might improve your speed or comfort, but then again, might not.

If you want to give it a try, go ahead and do it. I'd suggest games to learn - they may be a little silly, but they do the job with less frustration. Plus once you get the muscle memory set, there isn't nearly as much frustration. If you want to learn to not look, tape a piece of paper to the top of the keyboard so it covers your hands.

dozzie 9 years ago |

> Work gets done comfortable fast, but I wonder whether I should try and force myself to learn how to touch type properly.

In my opinion, no. It always amuses me when somebody wants to learn to touch-type just to learn touch-type. If one really needs it (i.e. writes a lot on a keyboard), they'll learn it soon enough just from the practice.

That said, you may grow with time using more of your fingers. It may even be because you decided to try using those fingers that otherwise were idle (maybe one at a time; that was my case). But forcing yourself to learn? I would say it's not worth the hassle.

What actually matters to me is how fast I type and how accurate it is. You may want to check your results in some on-line test. If you have typing speed average or better, don't bother with specifically learning more.

brudgers 9 years ago |

Not with touch typing directly, but years ago with ten-key and more recently a similar set of mental remappings to text editing using Emacs key combinations in lieu of CUI and the mouse.

My advice: don't force yourself. Just resolve to more frequently make a conscious effort to spend a bit of time touch typing. Maybe it's five minutes on a task requiring little flow. Maybe it's replying to email or typing into little boxes on the internet. Maybe it's working on a side project.

That way, productive work won't take a hit, there's calander scale time to develop alternative habits, and it's not an exercise in self-flagellation.

Finally, it's ok to use different techniques at different times, there's no rule requiring a single mode of keyboard interactions.

Good luck.

MegaLeon 9 years ago | |

Thanks! I was thinking of starting practising with tools like typing.com every day, slowly upping practice time and taking weekly tests to gauge progress.

Then, once able to type regular sentences without banging my head on the desk, switch to touch type for short tasks, then side projects and then non-urgent work stuff.

Might track this and see how long it takes me to get comfortable with it.

brudgers 9 years ago | | |

That sounds reasonable. If it's going to be tracked, it could be blogged [1], and that might be a place to practice touch typing.

[1]: or tweeted or facebooked.

HerpDerpLerp 9 years ago |

When you start getting repetitive strain injuries you will wish you had made the effort to spread the strain over more fingers!

If it is the sort of thing that would work for you then "The Typing of the Dead" may help give immediate feedback for speed and accuracy.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/246580/

dalke 9 years ago |

Read http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirties... .