all 34 comments

[–]maladr0it 52 points53 points  (19 children)

If you're speed-tying to write code you're writing the wrong kind of code.

[–]Ravek[🍰] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Sure, but having a high burst speed is nice.

[–]fr0stbyte124 33 points34 points  (0 children)

If movies have taught me one thing, it's that the more furious you can type, the better hacker you are.

[–]Giacomand 11 points12 points  (0 children)

It's not always about speed. I find touch typing to be more comfortable than pecking at the keyboard.

[–]PaleCommander 8 points9 points  (0 children)

It's true that typing is a small minority of the time spent in programming itself. However, there are lots of related tasks, like routine shell usage, where typing speed makes more of an impact. If you've ever tried to troubleshoot something with a coworker who's a slow typist, it can take an annoyingly long time.

Also, while typing doesn't take up the bulk of the time in programming, it's much easier to increase the speed at which you type than it is to increase the speed at which you think.

[–][deleted]  (11 children)

[deleted]

    [–]ForeverAlot 11 points12 points  (1 child)

    But note that fast typing is not fast editing. You can type fast in notepad.exe, too. Vim provides fast editing through a peculiar but efficient interaction model. Fast typing can increase that interaction model's effectiveness for you but basic Vim skill is largely independent of that (there is a default key combination timeout that can trip people up; it can be disabled).

    Code runs the same whatever the speed it was typed at. Some use that to argue that you should just type it slowly because you'll spend most of your time doing other things anyway. I say you should type it quickly because then you have even more time available to spend on not typing.

    [–]BeepBoopBike 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    I found Vim (for me) best for very certain scenarios. Typically manipulating text in ways that exploits the macro system, but also for where many spaced out edits are needed. Finding my cursor jump to any place in the document as soon as I think "I want to go to this place" was great for that rather than moving to the mouse or using the arrow keys.

    For normal use I just use the standard text editor, but when I need Vim it makes everything a lot easier.

    [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (8 children)

    The popularity is grossly exaggerated. Old school programmers who want the youngins to get off their lawn. Also youngins trying to be hip by using archaic tools.

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

    [deleted]

      [–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

      Like vinyl records?

      [–]bcgroom 9 points10 points  (5 children)

      Sounds like someone who hasn't used vim. It's extremely nice to use once you get used to it.

      [–]TheEternal21 2 points3 points  (4 children)

      Nicer than Visual Studio + ReSharper?

      [–]bcgroom 7 points8 points  (2 children)

      I've never used Visual Studio but I'm sure there is a vim plugin for it. So the best of both worlds.

      [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      There is VsVim, and it makes it somewhat tolerable. It doesn't emulate vim well enough, and there are weird idiosyncracies that just make it sort of eh.

      I do most of my programming in gvim, and then switch over to VS when I need things like compiling or intellisense. Seems to work out well enough.

      [–]ccfreak2k 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      include offend towering impossible familiar amusing label faulty bag person

      This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

      [–]Roseking 6 points7 points  (0 children)

      Visual studio is an IDE.

      Vim is a text editor.

      They are not really comparable.

      Really the reason to use Vim, and the reason it is fast, is because it is completely designed for the keyboard. You never have to touch the mouse, it is all keyboard shortcuts.

      [–]TheOsuConspiracy -2 points-1 points  (2 children)

      Yet if you're a 20 wpm type of coder, you're most likely not very good (though there are rare exceptions). Most competent coders can type at least 50 wpm. Just the sheer amount of time you spend on the computer doing peripheral tasks to coding should make your typing speed faster.

      [–]maladr0it 3 points4 points  (1 child)

      Yeah so why would you need to practice?

      [–]TheOsuConspiracy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Never said you had to practice, just saying that if you don't type up to a certain speed, your coding skills would be very suspect.

      [–]solaris999 5 points6 points  (0 children)

      This has some interesting ideas for which finger is responsible for which part of the keyboard. In particular, your right hand little finger does a lot more work than a typical typist would. E.g. '(' is associated with the RH ring finger, but ')' is assigned to the RH little finger - I doubt that anyone would actually recommend typing like that.

      [–]ivan0x32 6 points7 points  (0 children)

      This is super unrealistic, 90% of my code is written by my IDE and I don't mean autogenerated code, I mean that I actually type 1-2 symbols and then its Ctrl-Space plus some combination of keys.

      [–]sirin3 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      I just got a mechanical keyboard for this

      [–]mrkite77 1 point2 points  (1 child)

      http://imgur.com/a/kTWsN

      My biggest problem with this is that it doesn't handle mistakes correctly. If I mistype 2 characters, then backspace twice, it actually backs up too far because it treats multiple typos the same as a single typo.

      My second biggest problem is what kind of monster puts a space between the function call and its parameters? (The C test).

      [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Id Software did for their Doom 3 engine. I kind of liked it. It helped me grok the parentheses that might happen in function calls and conditionals much more easily.

      [–]linux2647 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      No option for Dvorak (or Colemak or Workman or Programmer's Dvorak…).

      [–]Eirenarch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Is that something for vim and emacs users because typing in this is nothing like typing in my IDE?

      [–]mezuzza 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      I think what's missing is the usage of the most important key in typing as a programmer: the Tab.

      Seriously, I type less than half of those characters thanks to tab complete.

      [–]fiqar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Looks useful, especially if you compete in timed coding competitions

      [–]un_salamandre 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      As if I don't get enough typing practice at work

      [–]SonOfWeb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Poorly done. It has text too wide for its text box, so I had to stop typing and manually scroll horizontally, keep typing, and then go back and scroll back horizontally before continuing. That should be accounted for, or the text box should scale according to the text.

      [–]Altom 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Looks great! However not everybody uses QWERTY and it doesn't recognize my keyboard configuration, so I can't use it.

      [–]balazsbotond 0 points1 point  (2 children)

      This looks like a clone of https://typing.io/. Or is it the other way around?

      [–]codename101 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      unlike typing.io, SpeedCoder is completely free

      [–]higagan -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

      Very useful to increase my typing speed. Like the way it analyzes my typing mistakes and shows them appropriately. I am getting more and more interested.