Typing away at something just now, I decided to change the word ‘coincidentally’ to ‘accidentally’. Obviously, there was no point in deleting the 'ally' at the end - that's four keystrokes of my valuable time. So, I put my cursor in front of the a, and prepared to hit backspace. Then I noticed the words had more in common than I thought. There was a 'dent' I had no need to delete and retype... and come to that, a 'ci' in front of that! So, I diligently moved my cursor back through the letters till it was between 'coin' and ‘cidentally’. Then I started deleting. But when I got to the last letter, I noticed it was a c, and I needed a double c for 'accidentally'. So I hopped over it, and placed an ‘a’ before it. Voila.
All this was done without the least hint of self-awareness, as just the logical thing to do. My God, but for someone who is prepared to drop everything for half an hour to stick paper eyes on a tulip, I seem very careful not to waste vital milliseconds typing letters twice…
Also, my guess would be that the use of the cursor keys makes the number of keystrokes about the same. I know because Mark does this a lot. It infuriates me. It's a fool's errand.
ReplyDeleteBut using those easy arrows instead of having to feel for the right letters? It's definitely a time-saver.
ReplyDeleteno, it's definitely a saving. It's one cursor press versus a backspace plus retyping the letter.
ReplyDeletehope this helps. together we can help banish rsi and extend the running life of our precious keyboards.