[LMB] AKICIF: touch typing

[Dan Tilque]

Martin Gill wrote:


> My typing style has become all my own. It's actually rather
> interesting how my typing style matches fairly closely to what
> is taught for touch typing, so there must be some logic to it.
> I tend to only use about 8 of my fingers for tying and I
> probably move some fingers more than others, but the my typing
> style has optimised itself for how I write, and more
> importantly for what I write.  As I programmer I need the
> special characters much more than someone writing a simple
> document or a book might need them.

My typing style[1] is probably somewhat similar to yours,
although I got to it by a totally different path. I actually
don't keep my fingers on the keyboard, but rather a half an inch
or so above it. I only use my pinkies for the cntl key[2] and not
even always for that. I tend to use my ring fingers for all kinds
of things like shifting, backspacing, enter key, and most of the
special keys to the right of the main keyboard.

I actually did learn to touch type while in 9th grade (age 14)
because it was a required course at my high school. The teacher
was also the football coach and would spend much time in class
reviewing the game film from the previous week's game. (While we
were do typing exercises, he projected the film on the wall near
his desk where we couldn't see it.) Shows you where he put his
priorities.

At any rate, I managed to pass the course, but was never very
good at it. My pinkie fingers were always too weak for the
demands touch typing placed on them. And my skills fell into
disuse for the remainder of high school.

In college, I took a computer science course and had to do my own
keypunching. Many of you may remember key punch machines. IIRC,
they only had a shift key on the left side. Number keys were not
along the top row, but rather were the shifted values of letters
on the right side of the keyboard (in a ten key pattern).
Non-alphanumeric keys needed for programming were in various
places I no longer remember. Well, actually they were mostly
shifted letters, but I no longer remember which were on which
letter.

Now programming requires lots of these non-alpha characters. So
while I knew where all the alpha characters were, I was back to
hunt and peck for everything else. And everything else was
probably over half of your typical program (at the time, this was
almost all FORTRAN and assembler, but the language doesn't
matter -- they all use lots of non-alpha chars). So basically
keypunching ruined what little touch typing I'd retained.

Eventually, monitors replaced keypunches, but by then the damage
was done. Like a lot of programmers, I worked out a system that
I'm fairly proficient at, even though a touch typist purist would
strongly object to.

--
Dan Tilque

[1] Thinking about my typing style at the beginning of this post
really threw a monkey wrench into my typing for a while. My
fingers became selfconscious, you might say.

[2] Pinkies are used with the cntl key because it lets the index
finger reach any of the other keys on its side of the keyboard.
You can't hit cntl-Y, for example, with the ring finger on the
cntl. Well, you can if you use the other hand, but that's not how
I do it.