Thoughts on touch-typing

I used to be pretty good at typing, then I went to Spain and swapped my beloved US keyboard for a Spanish one, and everything fell to pieces.

While the letter keys were all the same, a bunch of keys that are critical to programming — frequently-used punctuation marks — were moved. Worse still, many of them could only be accessed while holding down the option key.

This did untold damage to my muscle memory. I developed the terrible habit of lifting my right hand from the keyboard so that I could see where all those pesky punctuation characters that I was looking for were hiding.

Fast-forward seven years and I found myself living in the US with a US keyboard again. I went through the painful adaptation process all over again, and over the last 14 months I’ve been trying hard to shake the awful bad habits I’ve acquired with my right hand.

In a nutshell, I’ve become so used to moving my right hand back and forth, I find myself using the index and middle fingers to do far more than they were intended to do; a particularly harmful example is that if I ever need to use the cursor keys I find myself doing it with index/middle fingers without even thinking about it.

This is terrible for touch-typing as it introduces a lengthy transit delay whenever I have to move my hand back to its rightful place on the home row. Worse still, if I’m in a hurry (as I often am) I don’t move it back to its rightful place and I end up making mistakes and having to look down at the keyboard to bump my hand back to where it’s supposed to be.

At my work we have a lot of very good typists and we’ll engage in occasional speed tests on typeracer.com. One of the faster typists (around 120 WPM) watched me typing as I shamefully demonstrated my corrupted right hand technique; she kindly told me that my left hand was "boss", we both knew that my right one was lamentable.

After months of thinking about it and rueing the situation, and occasionally using a touch-typing program to train myself again, I’ve decided to get serious. I don’t care if it slows me down, but from here on I’m going to consciously make a point of always using the right finger for the job; no more abuse and misuse of my two or three strongest fingers.

I’ve got an almost[*] blank keyboard on order and am hoping I can use it to enforce some discipline. (I say "almost" because the key labels are on the front, basically invisible from above, but you can still see them if you really, really get lost.)

I think I’m going to read and re-read Steve Yegge’s piece on touch-typing whenever I feel my motivation falter.

The one thing that’s troubling me is the disproportionately large chunk of the keyboard that the right pinky finger is supposed to cover. The relative weakness of that finger, and the importance of those keys for programming, pose a dilemma.

If you really use only your pink to cover all those keys then the poor little thing is going to be terribly overworked and I’m actually a little worried about how it will bear up under the stress.

On the other hand, I can’t see any other way to keep the other fingers where they really belong and hence reduce transit time and error rates. So, I’m going to give it a serious try. I’d like to see some close up video footage of really strong (programming) typists and observe just how they work their pinkies. (That sounds a bit rude, I know, but my interest is purely intellectual.)

The other thing that concerns me is a habit that I think I’ve basically had since I first began typing: using pretty much only the left shift key and never the right. That’s a bad habit too, as it overly taxes the left hand and could slow you down, but it’s also going to be awfully hard to shake off.