Do you think there is any relationship between programming and typing? When I started my career as a programmer, or even when I did programming in school I did know the do-not-look-at-the-keyboard typing. I did not use my thumb for the space bar, nor was I able to use the number keypad easily. I still cannot do the number keypad, but somewhere in the last 11 years I have taught myself touch typing, not through any formal course, but by using the multitude of free typing tutors available.
I cannot proclaim that typing improves your efficiency at programming. But there is some relationship between the two, that has affected me. Typing has become a second nature, so it is hardly any effort to record those couple of lines for documenting rationale behind a design decision, which used to seem extra or additional before. But the bigger reason is that many times I start coding directly, sometimes with parallel thoughts in mind. When I did know touch typing I used to spend my conscious thought on the next key to press, which made it a lot less effecitve. Now I feel marked improvement in that.
Not surprisingly this has been carried over to some other tasks, like writing emails or writing blog posts, like this one. It has removed the laziness in capturing and recording even the smallest data that I think matters to me. Coupled with my favorite editor, where I do writing of almost all my text, I get my most productive environment. This also means that I have gotten closer to the command line than the GUIs.
However, I have not seen this with others. Many of my friends and colleagues justify that IDEs and intellisense tools make typing unimportant. Even the modern word processors provide auto-completion features. I want to know what you think? Do you think typing helps you when you code, document, write or capture data? Or do you think that today’s tools do much better job than that.
January 11th, 2008 at 3:00 am
After reading the article “Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?”
[http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html], I decided to give Vim a try. I had
tried Emacs before, but never felt that I got more efficient in it than in any
other text editor. The main reason for that I think was that I could still use
Emacs as simple text editor: I didn’t *have* to learn all those fancy commands
that make you efficient, so I didn’t. With Vim I could literally not do
anything without learning weird commands. What happened was that when I had
learned to master a small set of commands (to the point where I could actually
do editing) I was also more efficient than I had ever been in another editor.
It is true that Vim has a steep learning curve (I fought a lot with it), but,
man, once you learn it, you won’t regret it.
I find Vim so powerful that I like to do as much typing in it as possible. The
Firefox plugin “It’s All Text!”
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125] enables me to write
comments like this one inside Vim. It might seem like writing this short piece
of text doesn’t require an advanced editor like Vim, but still the text that I
write has to be edited (more or less), and when it comes to text editing, Vim
is king.
Vim also has completion features. Even if it is not as powerful as true
intell-i-sense, it still saves a lot of time, and I don’t think you can be more
efficient in any IDE than in an advanced text editor.
Anyway, I’ve been reading your blog for a while because some of your posts
interested me. Keep up the good writing.
January 11th, 2008 at 5:27 am
Even i was bad at typing in my earlier days. But i do feel a good typing speed will increase your efficiency and even save time.
btw Abhijit , did you receive my mail ?
January 12th, 2008 at 12:43 am
I never had any formal typing training, and have never trained myself with any formal tools. Primarily, I use IDEs with intellisense. I am definitely *not* a touch-typist. My typing speed was so-so, until…
I met a client, and he was showing me some things on his PC. It was amazing to watch – it was like the computer magically responded to his touch. He had taken keyboard use to the next level. After that, I concentrated more on being like him. It did not take much – just remaining conscious of how I was interacting with the PC, every day. The rest flows from there.
Today, a touch-typist will still outperform me in Word, but when it comes to using my tools of choice, I am very quick. I feel I am more productive, because when I have something in my head, it is very quick to enter that into the computer, and I can spend more time thinking, and less time typing.
January 12th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Rickard, I share your feelings about vim. I learn vi back when I was introduced to Unix systems and was perplexed because it was so unlike other tools I had used. But now I want to do all my typing in it, and yes, I too use It’s All Text plugin
I am glad you like the posts here.
Madhur, I think typing frees your mind mentally, and that definitely boosts the productivity.
Steve, I agree with you that rather than a touch typist optimizing yourself in the tools you use matters. I am smooth with the alphabets, not so much with the numbers row or the numbers pad.