How many of you love to touch type?

[rrnbtter]

Greetings,
I took a typing class in Jr. High back in the 1950's just to have a goof off class. Back in those days mostly the girls took typing. I never knew that class would prove to be as valuable as I later discovered it to be. Once you learn it you never really lose it.

rrnbtter
Life is good! Live it to the Ubuntu-ist!

[malspa]

I took a typing class in Jr. High back in the 1950's just to have a goof off class. Back in those days mostly the girls took typing. I never knew that class would prove to be as valuable as I later discovered it to be. Once you learn it you never really lose it.

Same here, typing class in junior high, but in the '70s. Should be a required course, in my opinion. I hated my typing instructor, but I'd give her a big hug and a kiss if I saw her now, all these years later.

[Copper Bezel]

I've been using a netbook keyboard so long that my right hand acts funky when I type - I don't really use my ring finger and pinkie when I'm supposed to. But I recently got my favorite keyboard ever, and I've got to appreciate that thing where my hands get displaced and a whole line of text comes out shifted one character to the left or right on the keyboard. That's fun. = )

I'm embarrassingly slow at touch-typing - like, 50 words per minute. I never took any classes and learned it by doing it, but that's not an excuse for being bad at it.

[Bölvaður]

Being exposed to affectionate feelings towards typing on a keyboard has never occurred. I do not love it at all, nor do I hate it, but I did feel crippled when I did need to look at the keyboard. Typing in the dark on IRC helped me a lot to get over that feeling of being crippled as a keyboard warrior.

[vasa1]

If I could I would, but I can't so I shan't.

[bcschmerker]

I learned my keyboard techniques on an IBM® Selectric® III 96-character model and actually had a few problems adjusting to the System/51 keyboards, as the buckling spring/capactive keysensors of the Model F felt nothing like the Selectric® beam-spring/dual mode keys. Once used to the Model F, the Model M was little trouble; but most available keyboards for United States-purchased computers (as of 2012) use key spacings inconsistent with ANSI X3.154-1988, so I run into typos.

[1clue]

I'm a professional software developer. I can't tell you how many developers I know who don't touch type. It drives me absolutely up the wall. If you spend 5 hours a week or more on a computer, you should learn to type just to avoid wasting years of your life looking for keys you should know how to find without looking.

Guys/gals, if you type a character every 5 seconds or faster on average you know mostly where your keys are. You just don't TRUST yourself to know where they are. Most of you can do this and you won't waste more than a few hours, which will be paid back a thousand fold.

Get an appropriately sized cardboard box that can cover your keyboard and your entire mouse area. Cut one side out of it so your wrists fit through, put it over your keyboard so you can't see the keys but your hands aren't encumbered and your mouse is still accessible. Go back to work. Don't EVER look under the box. Hunt with your fingers, keep your hands over home row always.

You'll hate it at first, but stick with it.

If you aren't back up to speed by the end of the day, you're not trying. If you're not triple your original speed by the end of a week, then you're also not trying.

[JKyleOKC]

I learned it some 55 years ago, in preparation for becoming a newspaper reporter. At one time, after becoming the "rewrite man" for a large daily newspaper, I could take dictation over the phone from a reporter in the field, at about 120 WPM -- but those days are long behind me.

Today, I'm bothered by getting one hand off the home position and merrily typing away so that "quick brown fox" becomes "qiocl brpwm fpx" so I tend to look at the keyboard while typing just to make sure I'm in the right position.

It sure beats the old two-finger hunt-and-peck technique, still!!!

[3rdalbum]

I was taught how to touch-type back in high school. At first I didn't really like it as I was already pretty fast at two-finger typing.

Now, I can't imagine not typing "properly". Sometimes I meet people and they're amazed at how quickly I can tap out a sentence. It's kinda cool. Also, my fingers aren't the bottleneck - I can type almost as quickly as I think. Almost. Well, not quite, but I feel much more free to think and type at the same time.

The flip-side is that I hate touch-screen keyboards. I'm constantly hitting the wrong keys or having it "autocorrect" me a long way away from what I wanted to say. The touch-screen slows me down to two-finger speeds, and slower since it's registering the key adjacent to the one I meant to press. I feel encumbered and frustrated by the touch-screen.

[BrokenKingpin]

I don't need to look at the keyboard when I type, but probably would not be considered touch typing. For whatever reason I don't have much control over my ring fingers (and to a lesser extent my pinky fingers), so I move my hand around a bit more than most people. I am certainly not fast typer because of this, but I am also not overly slow. I am a computer programmer, so I have had lots of time to perfect my terrible typing methodology.