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I type with my two forefingers, and that's it. And I'm always looking at the keyboard when I type.
People are always stunned by the fact that although I'm one of the slowest typists in existence, I'm also one of the fastest writers.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I still remember how impressed I was when we in 8th grade were in "Work practice week": I was "working" in a newspaper's local editorial office and couldn't believe the speed of one of the other journalists hammering away on a Teletype 33 with two fingers only. This was after I had had my 8th grade touch typing class, but that guy could easily beat me with his two fingers on the TTY 33 against me on an IBM Selectric!
Today, I am a fast typist, but not necessarily a fast writer. I use the screen as a way to try out sentences, phrasing and wordings. I read what I have written, reconsider it, rephrase it, reword it ... or delete it. My rough guesstimate is that I type between three and five times the number of characters ever saved. If you look at what has survived revisions and editions (of my own, forget about what others cross out!), at most five percent of what is saved survives its first year. Maybe it is down to 2-3%; I never checked, but I wouldn't be surprised.
A few of my coworkers keep gigantic mental structures in their head, needing only a structure of labels/identifiers on their PCs to keep their thoughts organized. I am the other way around: I like to offload those complex structures from my brain, using the labels/identifiers to recall them when necessary.
So when I offload something to the keyboard/PC it is essential to me to get it right. Therefore, although I am a fast typist in the sense of keypresses per minute, quite a large fraction of those are deletes and rewrites. So, to some degree I am a fast typist, but a slow writer.
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Member 7989122 wrote: although I am a fast typist in the sense of keypresses per minute, quite a large fraction of those are deletes and rewrites. So, to some degree I am a fast typist, but a slow writer
That's the thing. Typing speed has precious little to do with either coding or writing.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I type with about six of my fingers (and my left thumb for the space bar) ...and I look at the keyboard regularly but the screen more so. I have never learned, or attempted to learn, touch typing and I can type faster, and more accurately, than most people in my office. There is one guy who can beat me for speed and he only uses about four fingers (and I can always hear him hammering at his keys). Touch typing is overrated especially when coding where you need to use {[( +-*/ and @#$!=, etc. on a regular basis. When I am working on my books I perhaps get up to higher speeds than when working on code, but not much.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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I'm a fast (and relatively precise) touch-typist, but what still gets me to this day is the fact that split/so-called ergonomic keyboards (where you have a gap between the keys for each hand) aren't doing it right. In typing class, you're taught to type 4 and 5 with the left index finger, and 6 and 7 with the right one...but a lot of ergonomic keyboards have 4/5/6 on the left side, and only 7 on the right. So that always trips me up when I'm trying to type in a 6 or ^ (Shift-6).
Then there's the function keys. They used to be grouped in sets of 4 (F1-F4, F5-F8, F9-F12). But no, my current keyboard splits them along with the rest of the keys - F1 through F5, then F6 through F12 (so shouldn't F6 be on the left, right above the 6, if they're going to pretend 6 shouldn't be on the right?)
Then there's the additional buttons that are unique to each keyboard, the Ins/Del/Home/End/PgUp/PgDown layout that can be inconsistent, the location of things like quotes that depend on the keyboard and language used by the OS...it's all slowing me down tremendously, especially when I switch keyboards. I took a touch-typing class over 30 years ago, but I still have to look at a keyboard for all of these. Gimme plain text though and I can bang out a full page in no time at all.
I play GTA Online, on a system with a different keyboard than the one I'm used to. Based on the results (especially as I'm trying to do other things in the game), you'd swear I can't type at all.
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I can't touch type either - at least not properly. I chicken peck at 100 wpm.
It's not pretty.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Awesome song, he was a truly great human being!
Young enough to know I can.
Old enough to know I shouldn't.
Stupid enough to do it anyway!
JaxCoder.com
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Yes Sir and btw I enjoy reading your JaxCoder 
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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hanks for the kind words, I don't get many visitors...except my photos they seem to get quite a few hits.
Young enough to know I can.
Old enough to know I shouldn't.
Stupid enough to do it anyway!
JaxCoder.com
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For me it was the part in "contact me" and then especially the "2 tours ..." which attracted my attention. After this I started reading the other stuff 
It does not solve my Problem, but it answers my question
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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Young enough to know I can.
Old enough to know I shouldn't.
Stupid enough to do it anyway!
JaxCoder.com
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Mike Hankey wrote: hanks for the kind words,
Freudian narcissism?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Arthritic paraphrasing
Young enough to know I can.
Old enough to know I shouldn't.
Stupid enough to do it anyway!
JaxCoder.com
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Questionable elucidation.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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One of the revelations that has come about as a result of covid-19 is that data is not the new oil. So many people working from have realised that bandwidth is the new oil. Data is just the vehicle.
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Which made me immediately associate to all those software developers grabbing every new language feature (or whatever feature) searching frenetically for some place to use it. The important thing is not solving a given problem more easily thanks to the new thing. What is important is to find some - no matter which one - code piece where they can display their mastery of this new feature. Who cares about solving problems? Having a long list of tools and techniques that you master is far more impressing on your CV that a varied list of actual real world problems you have solved during your programming career.
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I just realised that I'm doing that right now. I have just started using extension methods and I'm trigger happy when it comes to using them.
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codejet wrote: Data is just the vehicle.
Not sure I agree with that. I'd say that bandwidth is the pipeline. The bigger the pipeline the more oil/data you can transfer.
Soon, underprivileged will be defined by the amount of buffering one must endure for those precious cat videos or episodes of the masked singer. 
Covid-19 is like a bad software project...not enough testing to properly debug. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I like you analogy. Kindly complete it for me.
Pipeline - Bandwidth
Oil - Data
Vehicles - ?
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Hmmm...the pipeline moves the oil, the oil ultimately becomes fuel for a vehicle. The vehicle is the human interface. For data, the bandwidth is a characteristic of the network and the network(s) moves the data which ultimately is used by a device, possibly used by a human but not always. I suppose the receiving device might be considered the vehicle.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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Agreed that the analogy is flawed. I have a slow connection (5mbps), but frankly I've learned to live with it, I don't stream video (or at least not HD) at the same time I'm downloading anything, and frankly there isn't much I can't do--the data gets around despite my lack of bandwidth. I believe last time I checked with my ISP I could get 15mbps, but honestly I have a hard time justifying the monthly price difference (and one-time upgrade fee, which is ridiculous because they don't have anything to do on their end except change settings through software to make it happen).
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Ducks float. Oil floats.
BURN THE W---
... Oh. Maybe not.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Moved
"We can't stop here - this is bat country" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
modified 18-Apr-20 14:59pm.
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