I’m starting to learn to touch type correctly on a keyboard, but typing something like :q with the pinky finger always feels so awkward to me. Is it worth using it?
Definitely. Keep your palms high to make it easier for the pinky to reach. If you rest your palms on the keyboard, it will make it awkward to use the pinky for keys in the upper rows.
Yes. All the time.
Not for me, but then again I have residual nerve damage in my pinky fingers from a case of meningitis back in 2004.
However, I do still use my left pinky for the left shift key, and my right pinky for the enter key. At least those keys are big enough that the mild numbness doesn’t cause me to miss those keys.
Yes, q,a,z, shift, and control.
You’ll get used to it with practice. It’s fine if you prefer to type differently, but you’ll probably hit a plateau with how efficiently you can type (or you’ll rely on looking at the keyboard, which is not ideal).
I’ve got my caps lock key remapped to escape.
I use my left pinky for ctrl, shift, a, and my remapped caps lock/escape key.
I use my right pinky for shift, enter, and I’m pretty sure that’s all.
I use my ring fingers for backspace, tilde, tab, q, backslash, quote, and that probably isn’t a comprehensive list.
I use my middle finger for semicolon/colon! I never realized that before. Wild.
Yeah. I use it for ctrl, shift, enter, etc.
Yeah, mostly I use the pinky for hitting shift. Apostrophe, question mark, and brackets are next used. I play games so I also use it for hitting ctrl quite regularly by bending my pinky in and hitting it with the top of my nail.
Yeah. But I’m also using a keyboard layout where frequently used keys aren’t on my pinky, and a keyboard where modifiers are on my thumb cluster, rather than on my pinky.
Yes. I also use the heel of my hand, at least on the left side, at least for modifier keys. Everyone who has ever observed this (well, minus one, to be technically accurate) seems to have been personally offended by it.
Yes, I decided i wanted to learn touch typing a while ago, I switched to a different layout from QWERTY called Coleman, it’s fairly similar but puts the most common letters on the home row or near your first and second fingers, while keeping the position of common shortcut keys like Z, X, C.
I also switched my keyboard to an Ortholinear style which i found helped with my accuracy as i was learning.
Similarly I learned to properly type (which means using your pinkies) with Dvorak back in 2007. I stuck with it since anything is a gain beyond QWERTY &
_on the home row helps with programming & config.If you haven’t learned to touch type, you may as well use a layout that is gonna strain you less in the long run.
