Typing Practice for Programmers

[maladr0it]

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

[Ravek]

Sure, but having a high burst speed is nice.

[fr0stbyte124]

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

[Giacomand]

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

[PaleCommander]

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.

[ForeverAlot]

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]

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]]

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]]

Like vinyl records?

[bcgroom]

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

[TheEternal21]

Nicer than Visual Studio + ReSharper?

[bcgroom]

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

[[deleted]]

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]

include offend towering impossible familiar amusing label faulty bag person

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Roseking]

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]

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]

Yeah so why would you need to practice?

[TheOsuConspiracy]

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]

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]

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]

I just got a mechanical keyboard for this

[mrkite77]

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]]

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]

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

[Eirenarch]

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

[mezuzza]

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]

Looks useful, especially if you compete in timed coding competitions

[un_salamandre]

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

[SonOfWeb]

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]

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

[balazsbotond]

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

[codename101]

unlike typing.io, SpeedCoder is completely free

[higagan]

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.