[jamesfe]

The author proposes that we're somehow blocked from success because we can't type fast enough. Is that true? I don't agree; in fact, I'd rather be concise and communicate well than vomit more words onto the screen.

Additionally, beyond Dvorak, is there a better way to increase typing speed than spending what must be hours and hours building a bespoke solution for each one of your machines? And what is the cost of the inevitable tsunami of errors you make in the learning process? Are these neural pathways more valuable than say, learning a new language or practicing a different skill?

[swiley]

Personally I'm blocked from success because I spend too much time on Hacker News.

[jowsie]

There's always stenography

http://www.openstenoproject.org/

[melling]

For programming, we should be trying to type less. Tools like TabNine should help:

https://www.tabnine.com/

[ThePadawan]

Besides the deep learning part, this is already very much what working in C# and Visual Studio (Code) is like.

To get to

> new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions { foo = 3 });

, the keystrokes would be more like

< new Fo<tab><enter>

> new FoobarGenerator()

< .Cr<tab><enter>

> new FoobarGenerator().Create(

< new<tab><enter>

> new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions

< { f<tab><enter>

> new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions { foo =

< 3 } );

> new FoobarGenerator().Create(new FoobarOptions { foo = 3 });

[eitland]

> Besides the deep learning part, this is already very much what working in C# and Visual Studio (Code) is like.

Or any of the big 3 Java IDEs.

[alias-dev]

Or vim with a few plugins.

[boogies]

Or emacs, presumably (and TabNine supports “Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ Platform (IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, Android Studio, and others), Sublime Text, Vim, Vim (Deoplete), Vim (Coc), Emacs, Atom, [and] Jupyter Notebook”).

[Silhouette]

Interesting idea, but it's hard for me to reconcile the potential benefits with the pricing model in that specific case, particularly if the model it's using is only trained on open source and not evolving according to the user's own habits.

[gempir]

It keeps training on your own code when installed if you chose it to do so.

Although this was not a great experience on my already slow two core macbook.

The results were pretty amazing though.

[taeric]

I'm actually surprised not to see that mentioned on the page. Feels like merely a formal approach to what is otherwise an adhoc method.

[1123581321]

Not everyone’s words are equally valuable. Someone who does not vomit but actually has things worth saying, and a limited time in which to express them, would benefit from faster typing.

Worst case, it’s nice to get one’s job done faster to make time for other things.

You can always take your hands off the keyboard periodically if you want to write less.

[bonestormii_]

Right, but it's the vim effect.

For vim to become worth your time to learn to use effectively, you have to have a purpose to use it quite a lot. But it takes quite a lot of time, and causes quite a lot of errors in the mean time. Eventually, you are left with a skill and a tool that are a pleasure to use, but you literally must spend time actively learning how to use it. You cannot just pick it up, because you need to first memorize key combinations and the behavior of various modes. Then, you need to actually practice them.

And this proposed solution is even worse, because it suffers not only from the "vim effect", but from the "vim config effect", where you not only need to memorize, and practice, but actively configure your custom solution, which can take tons of time; is subject to loss/deletion; and is not universally available.

And god help me, what about programming? I honestly do not want to even think about multi-layered completions wreaking their havoc on everything I write, and the only alternative is different completions for different types of environments--even more cognitive load.

This seeks efficiency as represented by speed, but ignores efficiency as represented by ubiquity, generality, and low cognitive load.

If I want to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, it is more efficient to run. If I want to get from point A to point B with the minimum energy expenditure, it is more efficient to walk. To be truly efficient, you need smart, balanced goals.

[1123581321]

I disagree with most of this. These skills may be worth the time tradeoff to learn. They don’t increase the error rate. They can be learned during unproductive time (I learned Dvorak on conference calls at an old job.) They can be picked up and used marginally for immediate small gains with potential to improve over time (Vim is like this, not that I use it much.) Many programmers work in a couple bread-and-butter environments that already provide a lot of completions and macros—-typing speed in programming has long been evaluated differently from writing prose.

Everything you wrote about considering tradeoffs is sound, but is being misapplied because you’re overestimating the difficulty and underestimating the benefit due to placing too low a value on words.

[kevinh456]

There are so many things worth learning on unproductive time that making myself marginally more productive with an esoteric command line tool actually isn't the greatest value proposition. VIM, for instance, is my preferred editor. It's on every Unix machine I need. I learned a ton of basic things I can do with it. I don't customize it because I don't usually have the permissions or the time. It lets me get in, edit, get out. You have to judge the reason for a tool.

Personally, the best tool for typing productivity I ever have used is a keyboard with no letters on the key caps. It also means I'm the only person in my immediate circle that can use my computer at all. My wife literally can't use my PC.

[bonestormii_]

Words are already extremely cheap and effortless though, and saying that they have a higher value than I appraise them for doesn't address some of the issues I addressed, such as the very real problem on non-universal configurations.

If you want to spend your time that way, that's cool with me. I like vim. Such things have their place. Personally, I suspect this doesn't solve any problems I have.

[1123581321]

Your other issues were also addressed, the non-universal configurations by pointing out most people work in one or two environments most of the time. Worst case, it’s hard to imagine a quick disabling of conflicting macros being too large a price to work quickly in an environment for weeks or years.

I do concede this doesn’t solve any problems of yours as you don’t value what you do with your keyboard very much.

[bonestormii_]

Lol. I want to type full words, and feel that doing so is near frictionless. I access around 70 environments regularly, many of which are frequently re-imaged during testing, and I appreciate the fact that typing works the same on all of them. My co-workers also appreciate that I am not installing weird typing macros on our devices.

Efficiency for me is not the same as efficiency for you. Deal with it.

I'll also add that something like vim is specialized and very useful. It is easier to use vim in a mouseless environment, which is sometimes a necessity. I use it fairly well, and it has paid dividends on the time invested. I can appreciate the value of a good tool.

But typing speed is not the same as efficiency because standards are efficient in their own way. I'm sure you'll say "oh, you don't value words and have nothing important to say", but that's a ridiculous argument. It is simply that, in my opinion, this type of thing is not worth the overhead it creates, much like extremely customized vim configs. Time is invested in the pursuit of efficiency, and it is never returned. One day the config ceases to function correctly, or your friend/coworker/family member tries to use the keyboard and can't use it effectively, so it gets disabled.

[asdff]

this is exactly why I use nano and don't spend time reading blog posts about editors.

[bonestormii_]

Totally valid. I do like a vanilla vim though. It took some getting used to but I do find myself editing things in vim over ssh quite frequently and it is much easier for doing things like search/replace, etc.

Nano probably works too but I'm not nearly as proficient in it, so... vim!

[Cthulhu_]

I've been reading Craig Murray's blog, reporting on the Assange extradition case for a while now; he's apparently been managing on at best four hours of sleep a night for the past four weeks, spending his nights writing out his notes into posts. I think he'd benefit, although for him too, accuracy is important (https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/).

[joe_the_user]

I grew up back when typing was a skill. A good typist could type at about 60 words per minute. Such typing was always to either to copy a written text or to take dictation. I think it's extraordinarily rare to find someone who could write down their thoughts at that rate, even if they'd thought out a text beforehand.

I only learned to type at about 20-30 words per minute, still faster than many now but slow the measure of typists, and that's easily fast enough to keep up with my thoughts.

[AQuantized]

I assumed the average kid, at least on the upper range of that designation, would have been able to type faster than the previous generation. I understand the youngest generation is now much more using touch screens, but I didn't think that there would have been a steady decline from say 20 years ago.

[asdff]

The younger generation isn't taught to touch type in schools anymore. I'd be surprised if it didn't significantly drop between two cohorts of regular keyboard users from this generation and 20 years ago, honestly.

[BigJ1211]

Yes I've noticed that with my younger colleagues as well. (Dev work)

They can certainly type faster than the average 50-year old, but they can't touch type (or only partially).

It's odd that in the day and age of a lot of computer related work we don't teach touch-typing in schools anymore.

[1123581321]

That is true for many, and even 20wpm is overkill for some applications such as editing poetry. Fast typing is not a widespread skill.

However, some do benefit from the increased speed, some increase the speed of their thinking to match their potential output. Others benefit from the reduced delay between thinking and writing or editing a thought, analogous in software to working with a fast compile time or a dynamic repl.

[andi999]

Well there are on average 300 words on a page, if you type 60 words per minute, you have twelve pages per hours. So a novel in 2-3 working days, if typing speed were the limitation.

[aqme28]

This. I can type at about 100 wpm, (which is faster than most people), but I cannot _think_ at 100 wpm for any sustained period of time. I can speed-type a sentence or a few lines of code, but my output is still constrained by the time it takes to think through and revise the sentence or code in my mind.

[Silhouette]

I can type at about 100 wpm, (which is faster than most people), but I cannot _think_ at 100 wpm for any sustained period of time.

But the sustained part matters there. Personally, my desire to write long-form text is extremely bursty.

If I'm making notes during a discussion, I might not write anything for a considerable time. However, when an important point is made, I want to record it as quickly and passively as possible, so I can stay connected to whatever else is being said.

If I'm thinking deeply about something, again I might not write anything for a long time. Then if the idea I've been searching for all week clicks, I might make a lot of notes over the next couple of minutes, while the line of reasoning is completely clear in my mind.

I type English text at a comparable speed to a professional secretary, but a way of recording important thoughts even faster when I encounter them would be valuable to me. The same goes for concepts that aren't plain English, too, such as code, mathematics or some sort of diagram.

[aixi]

yes, but if you had difficulty typing your outbursts of thought then your output would be constrained by your typing speed i suppose

[copperx]

Speaking is faster than typing. Speech recognition is my go-to for writing prose these days.

[DoingIsLearning]

Do you have any particular software you recommend for Speech recognition? Do you know of any software that can cope with programming language syntax without introduced a tonne of dictation errors?

[Multicomp]

Last year, I used nuance dragon professional individual 15 for completing nanowrimo with ywriter 5 and an old work hand-me-down headset (Jabra Pro 9450 or thereabouts).

Over 98% of the prose was written by voice, and because of the headset's wireless range, I was able to wander around the house while thinking about what to say, with dragon happily riding down what I said and easily letting me correct when it made mistakes. I got very good at saying "full stop new paragraph" or, "select line, quote that, go back" to quote lines of dialogue. I expected to have to learn a million commands by rote memorization, but it seems like it became second nature within a day or two for first draft noveling purposes, I have no doubt that medical or legal uses have more advanced commands, but for writing a 50,000 plus word draft it was fine.

If you don't want to pay $300 for nuance dragon, I got scarily good results from trying out Microsoft office online word dictation via office 365 about 2 months ago via a $60 bluetooth headset for wfh.

I won't rely on the latter service myself because it is not offline speech recognition, and can be taken away at the flip of a switch, but for trying out if speech recognition is worth it for you to pay $200 on eBay or $300 in the store for dragon, it is certainly a useful feature to get off the ground.

[wenc]

Just curious, how did you deal with homonyms that get persistently misrecognized?

(I argue a lot with Alexa because she keeps getting stuff wrong even when I enunciate slowly. It is very annoying.)

[andi999]

You mean like 'riding down':-)

[Multicomp]

This. There's little substitute for seeing the program write down the wrong text and saying "correct that", then saying the correct number or saying "spell that" and spelling out a word instead.

The good news is, dragon appears to to learn which of the two word variations you use more often and begins to weight its word recognition towards those cases instead.

[m463]

That's an interesting question.

If your REPL loop[1] gets faster by increasing your typing speed, can you get more of your ideas out there whether you're a blogger, author or coder?

[1] read-eval-print-loop^2

[jedimastert]

> Additionally, beyond Dvorak, is there a better way to increase typing speed...

I'm really not convinced Dvorak intrinsically speeds up typing

[xmprt]

Even if Dvorak doesn't speed up typing intrinsically, it's still beneficial because it significantly reduces injuries caused by typing.

[AceyMan]

Look into the Workman keyboard layout project.

Very neat stuff.

[highmastdon]

Or Colemak for that matter

[asdff]

Typing fast is fools gold. I find I write gooder the slower I type. Be it writing code or composing emails.

[itsdsmurrell]

Damn, you must have motored that comment out.