typity typity type
Sep. 26th, 2010 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishrbandrews: You are obviously very Yeah, I very much am.
I can't write longhand for crap. My brain moves faster than the pencil does and I end up not being able to read half of what I write. My folks got a computer when I was five and by about the age of ten it was the greatest thing to have ever happened to me. When I typed things, people weren't constantly bitching about my handwriting: they were reading what I wrote.
(My eighth-grade English teacher despised typing and computers, and very nearly failed me for, among other things, turning in "spelling" homework that had been typed instead of handwritten. I know, I know, "tucker fail english that's unpossible!" This is how.)
In addition, writing papers for class over the last ten years taught me that I write well in fits and starts. "Outline" the whole thing, write a sentence that's going to need expanded to a paragraph or two and skip to the next bit. Occasionally go back and fill in parts when I feel like it. I do a hell of a lot of jumping around in any given document.
You'd think scrollbars (later, a scrollwheel) and a mouse would go well with this writing style. Truth is, I never got on well with the mouse. It's always felt like an extraneous tool, something that gets in the way of typing. Even the kickass trackball requires me to stop typing so I can start trackballin'. Laptop trackpads are better (closer to the keys) but less precise, so there's more fumbling and zooming and trying to aim the thing. I seek out keyboard shortcuts wherever I can, just to avoid having to move my arm off the keys.
Those keyboard shortcuts are as much a part of "writing" as the locations of the keys. I never learned how to type the "right" way; my fingers just know where the keys are. I've been known to type whole sentences without looking at the screen, just because I can. Same with the keyboard shortcuts, with navigating through the document (CTRL+arrow to jump words, SHIFT to select, etc).
Breaking those shortcuts causes me no end of frustration. Take Neo, for instance. I have an awful lot of trouble just plain writing with it because the meta-keys for navigating aren't quite where my fingers expect them to be, so I skip whole sections instead of just individual words, or accidentally jump to the start of the document. Or "Redo." Redo isn'tsomething I use very often but it's nice to have around at times. And it's not been standardized: some programs use CTRL+Y, some use SHIFT+CTRL+Z. I end up trying both, most times, in an effort to make it do what I want, and generally getting thrown out of whatever groove I was in.
Things that get in the way of making words go from brain to screen have no place in my writing life.
And having said all that, I acknowledge that I, like most humans, am spectacularly bad at understanding how I do things. So as I've been composing this entry, I've tried to pay attention to what keyboard commands I actually use, and what I would have to relearn to make "simple typing" as transparent as it is right now.
Some revelations:
- I can't tell how often I use Delete. On this keyboard I'm more likely to use Backspace because Delete is in a stupid place.
- I don't use End as much as I'd expected to. When I want to go to the end of a line, it's often either the last line in the document, or the last line in a section and there's a blank line or two after it, so I just hit "down left" because the arrow keys are closer than End to my hand.
- Home gets used more for "start of line" but I'll break out CTRL+Home for "top of document" more than I'd expected. That's probably about a 2:1 ratio.
- By far the most common way for me to navigate a document is with CTRL+left/right, often with SHIFT to delete or cut/paste whole gobs of text at once.
- I really like being able to SHIFT+CTRL+Left, CTRL+X to move the word I just typed. I like that I don't have to change meta keys to do it, and I like that I can use the two least-used fingers for the SHIFT+CTRL meta, leaving the other two free and fully mobile to hit X or C as needed. The index finger is less mobile if I'm using the thumb to hit a meta key, and much less so if I'm also pinning my pinky to SHIFT. Then I have to actually think about the key I'm hitting, especially if it's on the bottom row.
- PgUp/PgDn are mandatory, and ought to be single-key operations. This is unrelated to typing, though.
Which I think means I need to spend some time with a Mac and see how crazy it drives me. I'm in no particular rush on this: if I get a laptop I'm waiting at least until the new ones come out in Oct/Nov; if I get a desktop I can't really use it until I get a new chair, which I'm not doing until after I move. So, sometime, and sometime soonish.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-26 03:46 pm (UTC)So, my system:
I have a Dvorak keyboard. I don't always use it, but I switch in and out. Dvorak is better not because the letters are in different places but because the punctuation is; it's easier to extend your fingers than to curl them back, so moving the punctuation to the top row helps a lot.
I have every pointing device known to man. Bigass trackball, very nice wireless mouse, Apple Magic Trackpad. I had a tablet plugged in for a while. I leave them all plugged in and working, so that if my hand starts to hurt from mousing (mice use your index finger a lot, both for the left button and the wheel) I can switch to the trackball, which doesn't need my hand to move and uses my thumb for the buttons.
I use Emacs for a lot of stuff, and I've customized it a lot. I have a bunch of macros and I've mercilessly rebound standard Emacs keys to make more sense. I've put all my Emacs init files on Dropbox, so on a new machine, all I have to do is install Emacs, tell it to load either windows.el or mac.el when it starts, and everything's awesome.
The most important thing I've done, I think, is the caps lock key. Hitting caps lock is always a mistake. It's the keyboard equivalent of the ejection seat button. So, I rebound it to either control (on Windows) or command (on Mac). Windows and Mac no longer have different keyboard shortcuts for me; it's not ctrl+c vs cmd+c, it's capslock+c on both.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 03:25 pm (UTC)Capslock is a mistake 99.9% of the time. Then there's that one percent where I'm typing out a sentence that needs to be in all caps (SQL examples, for instance)...
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-28 12:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 03:24 pm (UTC)I am all about finding an awesome keyboard and using it until it falls apart, though. Which will ideally be NEVER because it's awesome. (I still don't know 99% of what the Windows key does, because I'm still using a 1995 Lexmark / ModelM at home.)
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 05:54 am (UTC)If you're really curious about your keyboard use patterns, there's a number of keyloggers that you could use to analyze what you use and how often.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 03:53 pm (UTC)And I'm not really all that curious; this brief survey will do for what I was needing. Thanks, though.
This reminds me.
Date: 2010-09-27 07:51 pm (UTC)Re: This reminds me.
Date: 2010-09-27 11:47 pm (UTC)Re: This reminds me.
Date: 2010-09-28 06:34 am (UTC)Re: This reminds me.
Date: 2010-09-28 11:41 am (UTC)Re: This reminds me.
Date: 2010-09-28 12:30 pm (UTC)(I have not heard this story...)
Re: This reminds me.
Date: 2010-09-28 02:53 pm (UTC)Anyway, one of us, I forget who, had the bright idea of using voice control. The Mac comes with a practically useless voice control system, and you can give it a name ("bootsie") and commands ("copy" or "paste"). So...
Needless to say, alcohol was involved.
Re: This reminds me.
Date: 2010-09-28 08:08 pm (UTC)Re: This reminds me.
Date: 2010-09-28 08:10 pm (UTC)Re: This reminds me.
Date: 2010-09-28 12:29 pm (UTC)