Often, when I mistype, unless I’m in a huge hurry and just sit on the backspace, I’ll be careful to not delete letters I’ve already typed, but move the cursor around them if they’ll be useful in the fix, because I don’t like to waste them.
Just so you know. I’m a child of parents who were children of the Depression. What can I say? I’m just frugal, if not always rational.
It is somewhat of a comfort to me to know I am not the only one to do this, I don’t know how much comfort it is to you to know that you have this in common with me!
I routinely do this with numbers.
I do it too. It’s not just the thrift absorbed from my parents, but also habits from the days of White-Out and Correct-Tape. I even used that thinner you added to White-Out to extend its miserable life.
And I’d buy one little jar at a time, from a retail office-supply shop. There were no big-box retailers back when…
Well, numbers are really valuable. Or at least quantifiable. You don’t want to throw them away if you can avoid it.
I take the opposite approach, depending on where the error is. If it’s near the end of the word, it’s quicker to backspace once or twice, and re-type. If the error more towards the beginning of the word, I’ll hit control-shift-left-arrow, then retype the entire word. That’s quicker for me as a touch typist, since my hands “think” in terms of whole words. It is slower and more cumbersome to left-arrow back to a specific point, then retype only certain letters.
I do the same thing. I’m a TV writer and I’m continually irritated by the lack of space efficiency on the standard script page. One day I plan on devising a new way of script formatting that wastes less space and paper.
While I’ll do that as well, or sometimes I’ll just highlight a whole word and retype it… getting it wrong and again, repeat and rinse. I am completely falling apart and that definitely included the digits.
Remember, it’s all electrons anyway. Or rather, the electron, as Feynmann would have it, simply coming back through time-reversal and being reused.
Yeah, I do it too. Same parental demographics also.