31–40 of 173 posts
On a somewhat relevant note - there was an interesting post I saw sometime back on designing an optimal keyboard layout https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21425426
The author's ultimate solution of "use OSX/iOS shortcuts for every word to speed up your typing" is pretty wild. I could imagine myself using this method when I think about the _tens of minutes_ of my life I've probably saved now by just making "@@" a shortcut for my email address. Unfortunately, like Dvorak, which the author also proposes, it has the "doesn't work on my friend's computer" problem. Although, maybe a…
> That’s right. The very first “Type-Writer,” designed by Christopher Sholes 146 years ago, used the exact same QWERTY keyboard that‘s in front of you. Weird, I can’t seem to find the M key to the right of my L. (Not that the resemblance isn’t clear, but that’s not the only difference and they did say “ exact same”).
Record yourself writing, or programming, or whatever it is you do at the keyboard. You will see that it is not the speed of your typing that is the bottleneck, it is the creative process. You are not a mindless machine hacking away at the keyboard. And, if you are, then the life hack take away is to stop and think a bit before typing. Going slower often has lots of benefits.
The legend of QWERTY being designed specifically to slow typists down will never die. It has that perfect "folk" quality, it should be true, the problem is simply that there isn't any evidence for it. What does stick out about QWERTY, is that you can type the word "typewriter" using only the top keys, a trick that made it easier for typewriter salesmen to memorize and demonstrate that little trick when selling their…
In fact, QWERTY was designed to prevent jamming of early typewriters, allowing to type faster . http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-hidden-secrets-of...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-...
It seems likely the keyboard layout was the result of working with typists to develop the best layout.
The "feature" that is built-in into most IDEs and most programmers are using on daily basis, e.g. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/using-live-templates.htm...
I really don't want to be that guy, but the typing with 3x speed certainly didn't helped the article to be concise and to the point.
If you're on Linux and want to do this look for ibus-typing-booster. I submitted it 6 days ago, but it didn't get much attention. Unlike the author's method of manually setting up shortcuts for the most used words, ibus-typing-booster learns your most frequent words and then it's just a matter of typing a few chars followed by space, which inserts the whole word.
Record yourself writing, or programming, or whatever it is you do at the keyboard. You will see that it is not the speed of your typing that is the bottleneck, it is the creative process. You are not a mindless machine hacking away at the keyboard. And, if you are, then the life hack take away is to stop and think a bit before typing. Going slower often has lots of benefits.
The author's ultimate solution of "use OSX/iOS shortcuts for every word to speed up your typing" is pretty wild. I could imagine myself using this method when I think about the _tens of minutes_ of my life I've probably saved now by just making "@@" a shortcut for my email address. Unfortunately, like Dvorak, which the author also proposes, it has the "doesn't work on my friend's computer" problem. Although, maybe a…
More annoying for me is that it has the "doesn't work in certain apps" problem. Firefox, for instance, blatantly ignores macOS's text replacement shortcuts.
Not affiliated, just a happy user.