I “learned” to type on manual typewriters back in the 80’s. To this day I pound on the keyboard so loudly that I had supervisor ding me for it on a review, in a professional organization where we all had Ph.D.'s, this was his complaint (he was retired with extreme prejudice a short time after, which fills my schadenfreude bucket to this day).
Of course I only type with two fingers and thumbs, so I guess I didn’t learn to type on those manual keyboards.
I loved the Model M keyboards. They were so beautiful. My last one died a few years ago. But it survived lost keys (I had a key kit), falling down stairs (even concrete ones), attacks by cats (not so much attacks as if you are typing and the cat would like your undivided attention they will sit on the keyboard and refuse to move), and other various and sundry mishaps. The distinctive clicky sound, the powerful spring return, the wonderfully easy cord replacements. I’ve never managed to get my typing back up to the speed of the old days with the Model M. I’m always tempted to track down a replacement and go back.
Hey there’s an old… I think navy? Saying:
If it’s stupid, but it works, it ain’t stupid.
I totally agree. I find that when I switch between my work desk setup, my work laptop and my home computer that I need an adjustment period of furious mistakes for a while before my fingers know and correct to the key spacing on the current keyboard.
It’s like if I woke up with slightly longer or shorter legs or arms, I guess I know what my elementary school son is going through, in some small way. That’s a good (but likely really expensive) prank, shrink someone’s office space by an unobvious 10% but in every other way identical. Let the humor commence.
I am sitting in front of two laptops, two other computers, 13 monitors, with another 4 computers and 6 monitors behind me.
All the keyboards are shit, though.
I cannot stand split keyboards, but that’s mainly due to being a completely self-taught typist. My fingers end up going every-which-way across the keyboard. It’s sort of a bizarre memorized hunt-and-peck that I don’t need to look at the keyboard to type in, but which would go to hell on a split keyboard.
I drove my teachers insane when I finally got to actual typing classes. No matter how much I practiced, my typing speed was so much slower with the “official” way to do it that I just couldn’t stick with it.
You’re joking, right?
EDIT: I AM SORRY, I DID NOT SEE THE PIGPILE. I GOT EXCITED.
not even a little. how many IDE’s do i have to mentally context switch between? eclipse, visual studio, komodo, vim, all on a daily basis. plus postgres, mysql, elasticsearch, s3cmd, and lucene. and windows, osx, ubuntu, and centos. all in the same day
I like the keyboards on the T450s Thinkpad I use now and the one I used some years back. OTOH I type lots and the cursor on both keyboards jumps unpredictably to other spots in the document. I guess it’s a bug, but it’s almost too boring even to think about let alone “research” so I work around it.
Every November (for NaNoWriMo) I’ve got to re-learn typing technique for this monster:
Getting re-used to a manual keyboard of any kind after a chiclet or touchscreen is fun. My poor computer keyboards take a beating for the first week or two until I can context-switch again.
Fixed that for ya. The worst are keyboards that have Victorian adding machine keypads, or no keypad at all! A real keypad looks like this:
Note the FIVE keys in the right end row. That’s a real keypad.
@japhroaig, IDEs are for the WEAK! 
that’s GNU’s to me 
don’t NOC it till you try it, amirite? 
I bought this 1914 Remington No. 10 a few months ago, to remind me what life used to be like. It really takes a bit of learning to hit the keys quickly enough that ghosting doesn’t occur. My brother relates that he’s very glad that he took typing in high school in the seventies. He now resides at www.selectric.org
This is the worst one I ever used, though.
The person that bought this deserves a long slow death.
I was amused by the micro-trend among brogrammers at my workplace of going with the matte black, entirely unmarked, clickiest possible keyboard. I assumed it was meant to express the idea that “I don’t even NEED to see what I’m typing, that’s just how plugged into the matrix I am”.
Hmph. This is the One True Keyboard. The original IBM Model M. Accept no substitutes.
Note the cable wrap rotting away due to age.
Heh, that’s why I usually install vim-bindings in whatever IDE I’m using so my brain doesn’t have to remap.
I just got so used to SSH not binding arrows correctly, that I don’t even bother when text editing.
No, no, and no. Why the hell do people like these monstrosities? So you can beef up your fingers to the size of your biceps?
