181–190 of 228 posts
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Most keyboards have a little raised bump on the F and J keys ;)
I once subscribed to a magazine and received the subscription at my address, but with a strange name. I took me a minute to realize that it had been touch typed, but with the right hand displaced to the right by one position.
scbrg snukes happily.
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That sort of blows my mind. How can you not learn to touch type? It will take you a month at most and it greatly improves life at a keyboard.
Probably, because most of the time when coding, you think, and do not type. Also you can do so much other stuff in a whole month. It might not really be worth it to spend a month on something, that improves speed of an activity, which is a small fraction of what you do while coding (perhaps it is!). Sure, if you do not plan to improve on other things, then that month might be well spent learning how to type faster/be…
For people who ask, "why use text-only editors like vim or Emacs, when I can use a full GUI IDE?": One of the reasons I haven't seen mentioned much is: I'm a touch typist, and I hate having to switch between mouse and keyboard! I have to take my attention off the screen. Slows me down. Disturbs my concentration. With Emacs, I can work for hours without ever having to hunt for the mouse, or without even having a mouse…
I found I am unique, I never learned to touch type but at the same time reaching for a mouse really slows me down. I realized years into using Vim that the reason I love it so much is that I can do all my editing from the keyboard and because it is a deterministic state machine (modal) I can have a mental copy of the editor running in my head while I'm not looking at the screen. This is important to me because I look…
For people who ask, "why use text-only editors like vim or Emacs, when I can use a full GUI IDE?": One of the reasons I haven't seen mentioned much is: I'm a touch typist, and I hate having to switch between mouse and keyboard! I have to take my attention off the screen. Slows me down. Disturbs my concentration. With Emacs, I can work for hours without ever having to hunt for the mouse, or without even having a mouse…
I find it amazing how common it is for programmers to not be touch typists (I mean typing without looking at the keys). Like, isn't that something you pick up by the sheer amount of keyboard time?
Honestly, I never really had that much love for Emacs until relatively recently. I've always dabbled due to it generally having good support for most languages (including esoteric ones) but recently I got into it a lot more due to the fact that many of the new-ish OSS editors but Emacs has always been there and likely will always be there. A few years back I got into Atom quite a bit since it checked all the boxes: e…
I'm also a recent Emacs enthusiast. Many many years ago, I never felt productive with the navigation and keys. Then, recently, I _really_ wanted to try org and thought "I'll force myself to use it". I started with Evil mode and Doom. I was blown away tbh. What I thought to be an "old" tool that would slow me down, is actually a massive booster (and fun!). My personal experience, of course.
For people who ask, "why use text-only editors like vim or Emacs, when I can use a full GUI IDE?": One of the reasons I haven't seen mentioned much is: I'm a touch typist, and I hate having to switch between mouse and keyboard! I have to take my attention off the screen. Slows me down. Disturbs my concentration. With Emacs, I can work for hours without ever having to hunt for the mouse, or without even having a mouse…
Still I hardly ever use mouse when using IDE's like Visual Studio C++ coding for example. It has shortcuts for everything.
For people who ask, "why use text-only editors like vim or Emacs, when I can use a full GUI IDE?": One of the reasons I haven't seen mentioned much is: I'm a touch typist, and I hate having to switch between mouse and keyboard! I have to take my attention off the screen. Slows me down. Disturbs my concentration. With Emacs, I can work for hours without ever having to hunt for the mouse, or without even having a mouse…
I find it amazing how common it is for programmers to not be touch typists (I mean typing without looking at the keys). Like, isn't that something you pick up by the sheer amount of keyboard time?
I could probably put a gun to my head spend a month and learn it but I do not really feel it slowing down my programming (I spend more time thinking and drawing some skeletons) so I've never bothered.
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It's worth mentioning that Emacs is not a text-only editor, but is able to function in a text only environment if configured to. I think many people never consider giving Emacs a shot because they think it's purely a terminal based program. Modern Emacs can be (and mostly is) compiled with GTK support and features a GTK interface, but can be launched in text-mode with a command line argument. If you don't mind using…
> If you don't mind using bleeding edge versions, there is a branch called "PGTK" that allows the GTK interface to run natively on Wayland! The two biggest Linux distros (Ubuntu and Fedora) are Wayland by default now. And the 'standard' Emacs distribution you install through the Software 'store' in both is GTK (which of course works). Wayland support isn't really a big deal anymore. I haven't come across any apps tha…
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I'm not that old (30's) but we were forced into learning how to touch-type throughout grade-school. Pretty much any white-collar work requires it. Getting through university basically requires it (even humanities courses; good luck writing long essays without it). It's shocking that anyone who went through school in a developed country can't touch-type.
Which developed countries have courses in school to learn touch typing? I have never, ever heard about it. Edit: by touch typing I mean having your index fingers on fj and from there using ALL keys without ever leaving the starting position, and yes that includes shift, alt and control and special characters. I know very few people who are really touch typists (I am a proficient one), and I don't believe for a second…
I told my teacher I don't need to touch type (I could already use a keyboard from tons of programming) so she said if I could beat her I could sit it out. I beat her and she kept up her end of the bargain.
However years later I wish I had just sucked up my pride and learnt it because I had to eventually anyway. It wasn't so useful for programming, but it's great for text (emails, etc.).
I find it interesting that in your view most people aren't touch typist. My experience (now in Australia) is that most people touch type. Although, there does seem to be a spectrum of purity. e.g. my fingers always remain on the home rows, but I use left shift for all capitals except Q, A, Z (when I'm using QWERTY).