💾 Archived View for matthiasportzel.com › gemlog › weird-typing captured on 2022-07-16 at 14:19:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-03)
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I just noticed that most of the time I hit space with the index finger of my right hand.
If I'm typing code, I move my right hand over to hit {} with my index and middle finger, with the pinky on right shift and the left thumb on space. But if I'm typing English like this, my right hand does a fair amount of rotating to the left in order to hit space.
Another interesting note, when I'm typing English, I use right shift almost exclusively. (When I'm playing a WASD game, I use the left shift, but with my ring finger. I do use thumb-space in that case.)
For an example, in `var i = 0;`, we get:
v—left index a—left ring r—left index —*right index* i—right middle —left thumb =—right middle —left thumb 0—right middle ;—right middle
And this is very satisfying for me to type. Because I get kind of a left-hand-right-hand rhythm going on, where I'm using the same finger on each hand but alternating hands to give me travel time. I think this is the reason for using my right index—a lot of words end in `e`, `d`, `s`, `a`, `t`, `g`—all left hand letters. So when my brain tries to—for whatever reason—optimize switching hands, I hit space with my right hand. I'll hit `y` with my left index so that my right index can hit space (since `y` is almost always at the end of a word). The main time when I will use my left thumb for space is at the end of a sentence, when my left index finger is hitting `.`.
The bottom line is that I try to type with my index and ring fingers more than my thumbs or pinkies. In order to do that, I have to move those fingers more. And in order to have time to move my hands, I try to alternate which hand is typing. This consequence is only intertesting because it leads to me rotating my hands a way that is dependent on English orthography.
This isn't particularly fast or accurate, I average around 50 words per minute. And quite a few typos, which I suspect is a result of this typing style.