A guy I know said it’s like random dungeon map generation. You know you’re eventually going to get to the treasure at the end, but you’re never exactly sure how you’re gonna get there.
John Steinbeck memorably remarked that the men of his generation were more familiar with the workings of the spark plug than the clitoris.
Lucky for me, women of my generation were more than happy to explain things to everyone’s satisfaction.
When I worked with a computer firm I was impressed by how blazingly fast and accurately the coders - all men - typed. As long as coding remains a major skill I think the stigma of touch typing being a girly thing will stay underground.
I’m having difficulty following this. Almost all my typing comes out of my head. Being able to type fast and accurately is hugely valuable and not in the least obsolete, even though I do it on a keyboard rather than a typewriter. So one can edit faster - that’s still correcting mistakes. How is that not a time-waster? I took a course after high school to improve my skills over two-fingered hunt and peck. I’m glad I did and I would recommend one to anybody and everybody.
Welll, cursive is coming back to many of the states whether people want it or not. Laws are being passed in states that it must be taught.
I’m fine with that. Handwriting improves cognition. I write when I can in my Kindle Scribe because it knocks things loose in my brain that I can’t get at digitally.
And on an even more distantly related subject, today I’m seeing news that
Court denies Tory Lanez’s request to submit new evidence in Megan Thee Stallion shooting case
Where the article is using the term “legal name” instead of “real name”. This is the first time I’ve ever seen that.
I also decided I needed to learn touch-typing after going to work in tech and listening to the coders’ fingers fly over the keyboards. My hunt and peck was embarrassing but had seen me through college and 15 years in engineering and construction management.
But I didn’t take a class, I bought a $29 software package (I can’t remember the title but this was before Mavis Beacon). Worked like a charm and was actually pretty fun. I can’t imagine sitting in a class for it.
My point is that, if I am typing something that I or someone else has already written out longhand, the only limiting factor to my speed is how fast I can type (i.e. how rapidly I can press all the right keys in the right order). If I’m typing out of my head, there’s also the limiting factor of how fast I can think of what I want to say, and so there’s no advantage to typing much faster than I can think.
When typing a post here on the SDMB, for example, don’t you ever go back and replace a word or a whole sentence with something else you think works better? Can’t really do that on an old-fashioned typewriter. If I were writing something important that I wanted typewritten, I’d have to either write it out longhand first and make corrections and edits on paper, or type a first draft and then retype the whole thing. But then the editing and the typing of the final draft would be two separate processes.
I don’t know what I would have learned if I had taken a typing course—some system? involving hitting specific keys with specific fingers? I don’t do it that way, but I don’t “two-fingered hunt and peck” either. I don’t have to hunt; I know where all the letters are on the keyboard. And I use more than two fingers; I use whichever fingers are handy.
That’s pretty much it. In the standard touch typing system 8 fingers and the right thumb are used. The hands remain still, always in the same position over the “home keys” with fingers arched. Each key on the keyboard is assigned a finger which is always the finger that strikes it. The wrists don’t move at all, the hands barely move, only the fingers themselves move.
That’s the funny thing. I don’t always know where all the letters are on the keyboard. I think of letters, or even words, and translating those ideas onto the keyboard is completely reflexive.
This causes two issues for me. The first is that when I’m having to enter a word or password in one of those UIs where they put a qwerty keyboard on the screen I do have to search for at least some of the letters. Not a lot but there’s some level of “where the heck is x again?” which is comical to me because typing x requires no thought at all - it just happens. The second issue is that there are two particular words where my reflex for that word is simply wrong and I end up missing a letter. When I come across those two I need to slow down and think through the word letter by letter instead of just letting my hands type the word by themselves… or go back and fix it after I screw it up yet again (while reminding myself I’m a dumbass).
This was long before home computers so I didn’t have this choice. I started with a portable typewriter, got a full manual typewriter, then an electric typewriter, and finally an electronic typewriter before I got my first computer keyboard, a thirty-year odyssey.
My kids learned to type by playing a Mackintosh typing game. There were short instruction sections followed by sections where letters, and, later, words, dropped down the screen. If you typed the letter or word before it reached the bottom, you got to keep going. It would slowly get faster until you lost and got the next instruction section.
I loooooved that game (well, one like it.)
I want to go back and do one for numbers. Numbers always slow me down.
I am otherwise an extremely fast (but not impressively accurate) typist.
Typing Tutor with Letter Invaders.
I’m left handed. I mostly use my left thumb. But the space bar is wide enough that either thumb may be used if you are typing fast enough – and your thumb can get sore if you are typing enough. Those old typewriters had to be hit hard, and the side of your thumb isn’t padded.
I wear out Mac laptop keys regularly but mostly sight type tho quckly.
I did take touch typing in high school and was reasonably proficient and can do a bit if I concentrate but in reality I use very low profile reading glasses so I can watch TV and type at the same time as I’m doing now.
I have never mastered the thumbs on the phone but am moving more and more to voice . 
That is reinforced with the Apple Watch.
ETA: @Thudlow_Boink in post 348; not sure how the reply linkage got lost.
In general I type like you and agree with your posts so far. I’ve got a very idiosyncratic style that uses all (or at least most) fingers.
But I wonder about this bit:
Maybe you’re a far faster typist than I am, or I’m a faster author than you are, but I can generally generate a sentence or two in my head nearly instantly, but then bashing out the 20 words takes ~20 seconds.
So upon some careful introspection, what I (seem to?) find is my mind has laid out an outline of a sentence, but it slowly feeds the words into the fingers at the rate they can handle. So without deep introspection, it subjectively feels like my typing is keeping up with my word generation. But in fact my typing is pacing my word generation. And at probably 1/3rd the speed I could be generating content if only I could type 3 words/sec instead of just 1.
As to this bit:
Yeah, that’s me. I learned to keyboard while writing code, not prose. Which uses vastly more special characters, shifted characters, etc., than does ordinary prose. Leading to a idiosyncratic style that favors access to all those oddball keys around the edges, not the 26 letters. Heck, you could damn near design a touch typing system where the “home row” is the top row.
As well, it’d be interesting to take a large corpus of code and design a keyboard layout that optimizes the fingering for the actual mix of characters struck in that particular language and type of application. Of course with modern IDEs and name auto-complete the characters struck are very different from the program text. So you’d actually have to gather your stats from a keylogger, not just digesting finished code files.
I know that despite Dvorak’s reputation for better speed, in actual testing that mostly doesn’t bear out. So maybe this idea would end up being a distinction that doesn’t produce a difference. But it sure would produce a weird keyboard! 
I’m a touch typist. But I’m developing some nerve problems in my left hand. My left hand pinky and ring finger are sort of numb. Always tingly like they are asleep. So the left side of the keyboard is a bit of an issue for me sometimes.
c (the computer language) was obviously designed for right-handed two-finger developers, who didn’t have the luxury of getting their coding sheets keyed in by key-punch operators.
Hence the hatred of ‘verbose’ languages like Pascal (‘begin’, ‘end’), and languages like Fortran and COBOL that can be typed without any symbols at all.
Obligatory Joe Millers Joke Book ref: 2583
OTOH, try having your first two serious computer languages be primitive BASIC (with 1-letter variable names) and APL.
That will be a serious case of negative transference versus the skills needed to type English prose. Or at least it was. I’m mostly better now. Mostly. 