I found myself reflecting this morning — which thumb do I use to type a space character? It turns out that I use my right thumb 100% of the time I believe. I wonder if later in life I will have a misshapen thumb because of it. Looking closely now, I think I may see an extra wrinkle or two forming on the side of that thumb. I also notice that I press space with the side of my thumb; I guess that’s all you can do, but I had never really thought about it before.
When I was in about sixth grade, I typed with two fingers of each hand. I knew where all the keys were and was quite fast, so I guess I at least had little ‘hunt’ in my hunting and pecking. But I still had to watch my fingers because they would drift to the wrong keys if I didn’t. It’s much faster to not have to look at the keyboard. Somewhere around freshman year of high school, I decided I better learn how to touch type. I pretty much just forced myself to type with my hands on the right keys, for a couple weeks maybe, and then I was already faster than I had been.
It was much later that I started to learn how to properly type the number keys, using a computer typing program I think. Even now I’m not completely accurate with them, but if I’m typing a lot of numbers, I’m great with the numeric keypad. That came from a childhood of recording lists of baseball card numbers and stuff like that as I collect them. I remember changing the Apple IIgs to German keyboard layout, so the period would become a comma on the numeric keypad, to type lists of numbers more easily.
You may be aware of the Dvorak keyboard layout. Supposedly the qwerty keyboard layout was designed to slow typists down, because old-fashioned typewriters could lock up if you type too fast. But now we are stuck with it. I once got on a kick to learn Dvorak, but dropped off after a while. But I will pass on this one ingenious trick at least. I think I learned it from a website rather than being this clever myself. On Linux, put these lines in your .bashrc file:
alias asdf='setxkbmap dvorak'
alias aoeu='setxkbmap us'
That way you always type the A-S-D-F keys to switch to the other keyboard layout, so when you’re frustrated trying Dvorak you can switch back without going insane!
I’m constantly amazed that so many people in the computer industry do not know how to type! Now when you are writing code, you use a lot of weird keys like {}[]|+=-_<>`~! — normal typists aren’t very good at those, so it’s not uncommon to type them slowly. And you don’t typically type a whole lot of letters in between those symbols, so you never really get typing super fast. And finally, you tend to think a lot more between lines, so you don’t necessarily have to be fast. But I’m convinced it still helps a lot – you might not be afraid to use comments for one thing. But these days, every coder also relies significantly on email, where plain old typing skill is obviously critical for speed. So, I’m telling you… learn how to type – you don’t even need a teacher or course or program or anything. Just force yourself to keep your fingers on the “home row” (yes that’s what those F/J-key feelers are for), and learn which fingers go to which letters!