Poll: Engineers/Hackers, can you touch type?

[ddrmaxgt37]

I noticed that many of my hacker/programmer friends don't ten finger touch type. How many of you can?

[simonsarris]

My father gave me a computer in 1992 when I was 4 (why?) so I began typing long before I knew there was a proper way. Neither of my parents were ever good at typing, and still use hunt-and-peck even today.

I remember when I was young, maybe 6 or 7 showing my uncle that I could type without having to look at the keys, and while I use all 10 fingers, my hand position is nowhere near the typical touch-typing one.

Usually my left hand comes at the keyboard perpendicular and my right one comes in at a 45 degree angle, so my hands are like:

    | \

on the keys. My left hand stays mostly stationary, occasionally extending the first digit, while my right hand moves left and right slightly as I go.

So considering this, which option on the above poll should I be pressing? I use all 10 fingers, and don't look at the keyboard to calibrate myself, so I technically do touch type, but I have never used the JF nibs to get my position and certainly don't maintain the traditional touch typing posture. (the fingers on the home row thing)

[makmanalp]

Same with the hunt and peck. With the hand angles too. I usually anchor my left pinkie on the ctrl key (which is why laptops that switch fn and ctrl annoy the crap out of me) but I find that sometimes that left hand drifts off of the ctrl but I keep typing fine. And then it sits back on there when I'm done.

Touch typing doesn't really take into account key-modifiers like shift / alt / ctrl, tab, f-keys, insert / delete or even home / end / pageup / pagedown which all come up very often during coding or doing stuff in the commandline or in your favourite editor.

[seancron]

I have a weird, hybrid way of typing. I don't have to look at the keys to know where to type, but I don't fully use all ten of my fingers. I type without using my pinky fingers, except to use them to press the shift keys.

[is_computer_on]

I type with 6 fingers (thumbs, middle and index fingers) and my average typing speed is 262 characters per minute with an error rate of 5% (as measured by a web based type speed test a couple of years ago, I don't remember the URL). It works for me. I do try to learn 10 finger typing every couple of years but I usually give up pretty quickly. Since I type so fast even with just 6 fingers, there just isn't enough incentive for me to learn 10 finger typing.

[statictype]

Would be interesting to hear what the average typing speeds are. I would guess somewhere around 80 wpm?

Edit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2366900

[gtech]

Yes I can, but only in the past few months did I learn. I used to use all of my fingers but my hands sort of danced around the keyboard and I would have to look down to check alignment every so often. I learned to touch type qwerty for 3 months, then switched to programmer dvorak a month ago. I wish I had stuck with touch typing when I first learned it in middle school.

[pontifier]

I couldn't untill I switched to the dvorak layout. To not even be able to look at the key caps forced me to learn to touch type.

[antpicnic]

When I first started programming, I used the hunt and peck method. Life was tedious.

Then I took a class called "One Hour to Touch Type" from the University of Washington's Experimental College. I actually learned the entire keyboard in about an hour. I practiced about 20 minutes per day for a month to become proficient.

[haseman]

My parents gave me a copy of typing tutor and said "For one hour of video games you need to do 10 minutes of typing." I was a comfortable touch-typest in weeks.

I didn't learn to really hammer out the words until I started dialing into the local collage modem pool to play muds.

[JoeAltmaier]

High school typing class. Most useful class I ever took for my chosen career.

[xtacy]

I was thinking you were asking if we could type on a touch screen :-)

[tejaswiy]

Indeed. I voted up on yes, wondering what the hell this was about till I actually got to the comments. Now I feel pretty stupid.

[bsphil]

Keyboarding was by far the most useful class I ever took in high school, even more valuable than all of my 8 AP classes together. Nothing has proven more useful on a day-to-day basis.

[forkrulassail]

Another interesting question would be, who has learned NEO or Dvorak layouts and actively use them.

[to3m]

I learned the Dvorak layout in 2002 and have used it ever since. I have never met anybody else in real life who has bothered though!

I type letters 8-fingered. My little fingers press the meta keys and Return. This might affects my typing speed a bit, but I type at 75+wpm, which is about as fast as I can think of anything worth typing.

[michaelcampbell]

I used dvorak for a few years and greatly enjoyed it. Ended up back on qwerty because I was switching around to too many machines and couldn't necessarily install a driver on all of them.

I tried Colemak recently, but my grey cells are brittle and I couldn't make the leap. Not due to any problem with Colemak, but with me I think.

[hcack]

I peck with eight and keep my thumbs on the trackpad. I end up having to move my hands less.

[wewyor]

I can and do but not the proper way with my hands in the right spots

[rostayob]

yes I can.