Last week, I tossed a comment about my pinky into the PC Gamer Slack channel, and it was like I’d just walked into a room and mispronounced the word bagel. I’d said something so immediately, obviously wrong to everyone but me that the five dudes and one woman up in orbit right now probably felt the shockwave of wrong reverberate through the International Space Station. Somehow there were no casualties, except my innocence.
I plug in a controller.
That is really weird. Having your pinky on ‘A’ and your middle finger on ‘D’?
Interesting article - I use my pinky on ‘A’ as well (middle finger on D, index finger roaming, etc). I was taught to type using the home row position and pushing ‘A’ with my pinky became natural. It may also help that I play piano and guitar so my pinky is used to doing a lot of dexterity work.
Until this moment I had no idea anyone did it differently!
HOW?!?
Oh. My. God. This is what I’ve always done as well. Commencing retraining.
(That’s interesting, Mr. Fraser. I grew up with a piano as well.)
I don’t believe you. You are properly capitalizing words all round, which imply a pinky resting on shift, as nature intended it.
It’s the sitting or standing thing again.
No, pinky moves down to shift as required - just like if we were typing.
Question for those of you who don’t rest your pinky on ‘A’ (i.e. you are not resting in home row position). What do you do when you need to type text during gameplay (e.g. chat message)? Do you move your entire hand to the right to get it into home row position so you can type naturally (and without looking)? Or some other trick?
Middle three fingers. Is there another way?
Piano players always freaked me out! The mere thought of it hurts!
WASD is for amateurs who use default key bindings because they don’t know any better.
ESDF is the only proper choice for the discerning gamer.
Haha! Well what do YOU do when you are typing and you need to capitalize?
I use a thumb along with my two index fingers.
I confess to using both hands more often than not, for that single purpose…
Yay, not alone :D
Instead of jesting, I’ll go into technicalities: my keyboard layout requires to use shift to type numbers (it is stupid), and on that occasion, I use a pinky-middle finger stretch quite often.
Yea, that’s how I do it. That leaves the pinky available for things like the shift, ctrl and tab buttons.
I do use a controller with some games, but with shooters I like the keyboard as aiming IMHO is easier with a keyboard and mouse.
You could make a similar argument the other way, with pinky on ‘A’, the index finger is available for things like R,F,V,T,G,B etc.
What about the numeric keypadders? I didn’t switch to WASD until I switched to laptops, but before that, I was using the numeric keypad and its nice symetry for my FPS. Felt a bit cramped with the mouse next to it.
Bioshock Infinite actually has me hitting the O, N and V buttons from time to time.
I’ve seen it done. Knew a guy who even bought a special keyboard that had the numeric keyboard on the left side. The main problem I have with it is the lack of access to other keys - even if you remap. Edit: And if you have to switch to typing text during gameplay its a massive jump.