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Discussion on: Touch Typing- The Most Important Skill For Developers Nobody Talks About

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Ben Coleman

When I first got into computers in college (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and microcomputers were just coming out), I quickly figured out that one of the best things I ever did was to take two typing classes in high school. I never tried any alternate layouts (the one I saw hyped back then was Dvorak), but I had fun dealing with ASCII layout vs Selectric layout (they're both QWERTY, but the difference is in the shift of the upper row number keys). That's less of an issue now that Selectric layout won out, but I had a programming job where I was regularly having to switch back and forth. I eventually got to where I could acclimate to one or the other after a few minutes. Nowadays, the most irritating aspect of layout is the placement of the \ key. I've gotten so used to the rectangular enter key with the \ key above it that I make sure the keyboards I buy use that, instead of having an L-shaped enter key and the \ key elsewhere (usually to the left of the backspace key).

And, yes, one of the major advantages of touch typing is that you have to think a lot less about typing, and can just think about the code or command you are doing. I don't know what my typing speed is, but I've gotten comments about how fast my keyboard speed is.