I basically never make any letter swap typos at all. I guess it's more common with faster typists that are using more fingers at once, and going fast enough that they aren't thinking one individual letters?
I never noticed myself doing it either. But after learning of Emacs (and MacOS) "transpose" shortcut C-t (aka Control-T on macs), I find I use it about once every 1-2 weeks.
It's not even faster than deleting the word and re-typing it, no. It's just funny.
I did not know about transpose but I am now fully convinced that Emacs shortcuts can be art.
Really, I tried it out and giggled out loud. Now how do I go about sharing this joke with my friends? "It all started in 1976... let me tell you about bucky bits."
I find that it largely depends on the keyboard that I'm using, but I can think of two scenarios when it happens to me.
If I'm typing at a steady pace ( no matter the speed), when a finger doesn't get the tactile feedback it expects, it may hesitate while the next finger strikes the next key on the same pace.
And for short commands like, `ls` or `cat`, I often hit the all the letters at nearly the same time which can swap letters.
Slow typist here, I make letter swap typos all the time. Cmd+T is my best friend.
Curious if other aphantastics are similarly slow/error prone? I cannot visualize a keyboard, and while I can usually type without looking, my form is poor and I do steal occasional glances.
I don't have a visual representation of the keyboard in my mind at all, but having touch typed (imperfectly) since high school, I can tell when I mistyped a key by feel too (eg. not looking at the output on the screen either, your muscle memory will let you know if any movement was awkard or unexpected).
FWIW, it's important to learn where the "corrective" (backspace, delete, cursor movement...) keys are on your keyboard while looking at the output: then you can easily push yourself to not look down on the keyboard while practicing.
Aphantastic here. I never learned to visualize a keyboard and went with blank keycaps to force myself to learn with weeks of painful brute force muscle memory. I learned Colemak which is much less finger travel and helped too as many words can be typed with home row.
I also do everything I possibly can on the command line because it is -one- interface to learn with a universal history to reference past commands vs randomly mucking about in GUI interfaces I can not picture in my head that are wildly different in every application.
Aphantastic here to say I have always had pretty great touch typing. In high school I would touch type on a HW keyboard phone - great to reply to texts while looking at my teacher for their presentation.
I do make mistakes but I don't feel particularly slow or error prone. As I said elsewhere I like to use the C-t command to fix letter swaps and I get them definitely less than once per normal day.
