I don't even come close to groking how one types without home row hand placement. How does that even work? Where are your hands if not starting at home row?
I’m not sure if this how other people do it but my hands sort of float around as I type rather than being fixed in one place. They gravitate towards home row but I was never trained “classically”. I type (peak) 140wpm.
my understanding of the homerow style is that you have a sort of assigned finger for each key. while I type, there is plenty of overlap between fingers and it's constantly adapting based on where my hands are currently vs resetting to one position
I'd never say I'm a classic home-rower, but I do use it as a starting point. My left hand mostly conforms, but I really only use my thumb and first two fingers on my right hand, so i get what you're saying about your hand moving all around.
And, yeah, 120-150wpm. I wonder if "kids these days" don't type as fast because they didn't grow up with IRC and AIM and so on. Of course, they're way faster with their thumbs than I am. My phone typing started bad and gets worse every year (somehow).
The best answer to this is literally "I don't know." I can actually observe what my hand does and give you an answer, but the truth is that I don't conciously make a choice. I do rely on the bumps on f and j to align my fingers initially, and I know I make use of keys with different shapes as landmarks. Otherwise though it just kind of floats around. I would guess it looks a bit like playing a musical instrument (but I don't play any, so hell if I know.)
My hands float around and don't really have any rules except left hand for left side and right hand for right side, where the sides are loosely defined. Some keys I may hit with one finger just to hit it with a different finger on the other hand the next word. I don't really know how I do it, I guess it's all about using whatever finger is closest and my hands float around so that the closest finger isn't always the same. I don't need the ridges on the keys, if I can find the space bar I can find every key. I also rarely use my right pinky finger except to hit Enter, it's usually too slow for anything else. I learned to type playing PK MUD games and I was up to 130-140 WPM. Nowadays I don't play MUD games very much and I'm usually around 110 WPM when I check. Also, I need a specific layout or else I'll miss a lot. Laptops don't generally have the layout I need and I'm very bad on them.
My left hand is on WASD which I suppose you could call home row and my right hand sits at <space>KL;<rshift>
So it's not too far from home row but definitely something more influenced by my gamer days than any formal typing lessons. Just tried a web based wpm test and got 90WPM at 95% accuracy. Used to be around 120WPM in my college days where I typed more essays, but these days typing speed isn't close to the bottleneck so not much need for faster typing and I guess it's atrophied some.
Home row is a reference, and once you get used to where your hands are relative to that reference point, it's pretty easy to hit the other keys. This can of course be a reference other than home row, like GP - although I think home row is simply the most logical place for it to be.
