I type with only two/three fingers. I don't hunt and peck, but I'm no touch typist either. I can type faster just with my index fingers than some people with all of their fingers.
That said, typing speed is not critical. I mean, if you're really slow I guess it matters, but it's no measure of the quality of your work. The brain is the bottleneck here, and all the slowness happens in the design/troubleshoot/think space anyway.
I use nearly all fingers, but where i really suffer is that i find key-combinations, notably alt+ to be really awkward because my hands are at a steep angle relative to the straight keyboard.
I live in Kakoune (vim-like) so "touch typing" is my bread and butter, but home-row just feels so bad to me.
I keep meaning to try a split keyboard with home-row. I suspect that's the root of my issue, and that my odd typing pattern is a result of trying to manually replicate a split keyboard. /shrug
https://mechboards.co.uk/shop/kits/helidox-corne-kit/#case
With small keyboards, you’re trading off physical distance between keys for having to press more buttons simultaneously. Might fix your problems with reaching key combinations, but the combinations themselves do become more complicated as well.
I'm still painfully slow. Maybe 50wpm tops for natural language, embarrassingly much less for programming.
Thing is, I'm now even slower than I was before "taking the plunge", and I can't even go back to my old loose method I've nurtured for 20 years!
On the flipside, as you mentioned, typing in itself isn't a huge bottleneck, especially with autocomplete, and I'm much faster navigating the ide. So maybe it's a net positive after all.
