Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Typing

508 words

I tend to think that touch-typing is the only way to go – if not for your typing speed, certainly for your neck and other body parts involved in sitting there looking down on the keyboard looking for the right keys.

I learned touch typing years ago at school, using the wonderful program MacDactylo. It made you type, re-type and re-type lines of 'aaaa aaas aaad....' over and over and was very strict, only letting you advance to the next level if you had at most one letter wrong at a reasonable speed. If you didn't the lesson was repeated until you managed. Like this you can 'conquer' the keyboard key by key. And rather quickly, I might add. I don't think the whole thing took more than two weeks. – Although I must admit that I didn't finish all the lessons, which is why I am still a bit weak when it comes to typing "§$% and such like.

Learning touch typing, binds you to the keyboard layout you learned it on. This is obvious and sounds minor, but I am always irritated if I have to use an English keyboard layout, with the Y and Z swapped around and punctuation marks sitting in different places than on a German keyboard. These are small points, but they always get me which is why I prefer using computers that let me choose the keyboard layout independent of the keyboard attached. Another difference is that, as far as I can tell, German keyboards have an extra key between the left Shift key and the 'Y' ('Z') key. It's the key for the angle brackets – which of course means that even with keyboard remapping in place typing HTML on an English keyboard ranges somewhere between annoying and impossible.

That much about the theory. Now a few words on practice. To begin with I find that I have good and bad typing days – reflected in both the speed and the precision of my typing. Bad typing days can be annoying. Then the keyboard does matter a lot. For example, I am currently quite unhappy with my (pretty) old iMac style external keyboard which I use at home. I think it deteriorated a lot over the past year and its keys seem to 'stick' slowing typing down a lot. Even the Powerbook's built-in keyboard 'feels' better by now. Although I must say that I don't consider it a particularly bad keyboard except from being a bit wobbly on the left.

And then there is the possibility of 'hacking' the keyboard in a non-touch typing way. Somehow it just feels cooler and maybe even faster – particularly for short Unix commands. Strange.

How do other people type? In Swimming Pool, for example you see the author typing quite a few times. Her typing looks strange. And it is very energetic – causing a lot of noise. Unfortunately I wasn't quick enough to see whether the actress is actually typing something for real or just moving her fingers over the keyboard.

May 23, 2004, 20:08

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