[jp57]

What's weird to me is that this seems like a totally implausible accidental misspelling, which just shows how differently people type, I guess.

I can see that 'i' and 'u' are adjacent on the keyboard, but if you touch-type, they belong to different fingers, and I can't see how I'd transpose them while getting all the other letters right. If my right hand were shifted over by a key, I might get 'gutguv' or 'gotjim', I guess.

[xxr]

I think the misspelling is more likely for someone who’s not super capable with English and doesn’t have familiarity with Git. Even for people who usually operate in (natural) languages that use the Latin alphabet (or something close to it, like the Greek or Cyrillic alphabets), without recognizing the cue word “hub,” “guthib.com” is as meaningful and memorable as “github.com.”

[chaorace]

I'm sure dsylexia gets the best of many capable people when banging out URLs.

I suspect that there's also a rather large overlap in the Venn Diagram of "people who use Github regularly" and "people who are sufficiently mentally toasted as to regularly make implausible errors".

[jstummbillig]

There are a lot of causes for misspelled words. Most of them are not of mechanical nature.

[kijin]

It happens more often than one might think. I know I've typed "guthib" at least a few times in the last decade or so that I've been using github, and coincidentally I just caught myself mistyping "decade" as "dedace". I pressed all the right keys, but in the wrong order.

I guess that packets from the brain sometimes suffer from a kind of race condition as they arrive at the fingers.

Maybe it's related to fact that we're surprisingly good at reading words with teh lettres shffuled aorund. Perhaps my brain is trying to type a word at a time, instead of individual letters, so the packets go out in parallel. Perhaps the last point has something to do with the fact that my native language is Korean, where a word is written as a compact two-dimensional arrangement of symbols rather than a simple sequence of symbols. I dunno, it just happens a lot.

[bragr]

>if you touch-type, they belong to different fingers

Not all touch-typers use or ever even learned the formal touch-type method.

[codetrotter]

And also, not all touch-typers use QWERTY ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout

[yamtaddle]

I used almost never to make any sort of error whatsoever when typing, that I didn't immediately catch and fix.

IDK if it's age-related decline (I'm not even quite 40 yet...) or what but now I make all those homophone and bizarre-letter-substitution errors that I never, ever used to, constantly. I have to re-read everything I type or I'll have a stupid error like that every few hundred words.

[asicsp]

I recently found that I had typed 'hexadecimal' as 'hexademical' multiple times (only caught it via a spell checker).

[WorldMaker]

To my understanding, letter transpositions are common even for great touch typists. Especially letters in the same "category" (such as shifting vowels around in this instance). Sure, it's a different "feel" when typing it wrong and if you are paying attention you might catch it, but you generally when touch typing don't think about the specific feel of individual letters, but the pattern or "shape" of the overall word. "gut" is a common enough word pattern (and an English word in its own right). "hib" is not, but if your brain/muscle memory is expecting the full "word" "github" and knows it uses both fingers "in the middle of the shapes" and it already used "u" it can be a likely transposition to wind up with "hib".

[jbirer]

Doesn't seem that implausible given that we can read words just by reading the first letter and last letter, even if the letters in the middle are in the wrong order. We take words as lump-sum abstract objects instead of focusing on each of the letter.

[rgoulter]

> this seems like a totally implausible accidental misspelling

Yeah, I remember seeing this website as "a typo of github", but wasn't able to rediscover it.

[hoosieree]

Anecdotally, I've typed gihtub many times, but never guthib. Related: enabling a spell checker in my editor was a very humbling experience.