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Rapid-Fire Typing: Difference between revisions
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** [[Fridge Logic|Answering millions of prayers/mails still should wear out the keyboard.]] But OK, he can fix that too. Plus, it's most likely a metaphorical keyboard on a metaphorical computer.
*** [[Rule of Three|While drinking metaphorical coffee?]]
* Done for laughs by an airline clerk in ''[[Meet the Parents]]'', with the humor coming from the fact that she employs [[Rapid-Fire Typing]] for a straight thirty seconds just to confirm Greg's flight.
** Something similar is done in ''Soul Plane'', except that the (elderly) airline clerk isn't ''actually'' doing anything--she's playing video games!
* A particularly hilarious example shows up in the [[Whoopi Goldberg]] film ''Jumpin' Jack Flash''. Goldberg, who has just been contacted by a spy while putting in some overtime at her work terminal, engages in a friendly chat with the stranger. She rattles off a few seconds of [[Rapid-Fire Typing]] and then [[Sounding It Out|helpfully narrates]] her response: "Yo."
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** You have obviously never encountered a command line purist.
* ''[[24]]'' is a particularly egregious example. No-one ever seems to use a mouse.
** Considering the people actually using the computers - Chloe, for instance - are extraordinarily skilled, this isn't too far off. Many experienced techies will prefer a keyboard for some applications, because it can be quicker if you're a good typist, and many of the advanced commands are only available on a command line.
* In an episode of ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'', Carter, granted [[Super Speed]], works on a book about wormhole physics she'd wanted to write for a while, but "didn't have time to." Now, she operates so fast that her hands blur over the keyboard and she occasionally has to stop and wait for the keyboard buffer to clear out. Of course, for all we know, she ''is'' making typos and fixing them; it's just that she's operating very, very, ''very'' fast.
* Similarly, in ''[[Lois and Clark]]'', Superman once speed-tried a bunch of different passwords, whether they're dictionary words or random alphanumerics, until finding the right one. The keyboard was smoking by the end of it.
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* ''[[Doctor Who]]'''s "School Reunion" has kids hypnotized into doing this in order to unlock some [[MacGuffin]].
** Donna accomplishes this in the series 4 [[Grand Finale]], [[Hand Wave|hand waved]] by her claiming to be the best temp in London.
** Similar to the ''Superman'' example above, a Dalek in the eponymous episode hammered through a billion password combinations on a keypad in one second, apparently using directed suction with its sucker hand.
*** Either that, or he was putting electrons directly into the chip (making the entry of that many passwords more plausible than with button-clicking.) Of course, the real question is why the high budget, high security facility doesn't require smartcards in addition to PINs on the doors... with that setup, there would be quadrillions (or more) of potential card/PIN combinations and even at the CPU's clock speed it would take a significant amount of time (hours or days) to go through them all.
** The Doctor does this a lot, especially in "The Eleventh Hour", where he establishes his identity by typing the ''real'' Fermat's Last Theorem and a proof for faster-than-light travel (with diagrams), and codes a computer virus on a cell phone, in about two minutes. How does he make diagrams by typing really fast?
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* Parodied in a skit on ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'', although they flat-out revealed that the actor was just typing rapid gibberish.
* ''[[iCarly]]''. Freddie, the resident "computer genius", does this ''all the time''. Someone hacked the iCarly website? ''Rapid typing''. Need to edit a discriminating photo? ''Rapid Typing''.
* Strangely, on ''[[Lie to Me (TV series)|Lie to Me]]'', whenever someone asks Loker to call up a picture, not only does he never need them to be more specific than "that one thing you showed me the other day", but he never uses a mouse.
* Subverted on ''[[Stargate Universe]]'', when Rush is forced to work on the {{spoiler|Lucian Alliance's Icarus gate}} program, he taps on the keyboard wildly for a few seconds and says "Alright then, I'm done." He then has to explain that he's kidding and the work will take a long time.
* Frequently employed by Bryce and Theora on ''[[Max Headroom]]'', where all the keyboards are antique typewriters and the monitors never actually display what they type.
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* Princess Peach in ''[[Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door]]'' whenever she types a message to e-mail Mario. Apparently she must have learned speed typing at some point.
** It's a message, not programming -- presumably she thinks about what to write while completing the [[Fetch Quest]] for permission to send it, and can simply type it straight out.
* The Flash game ''Stealth Hunter 2'' incorporates this as a gameplay mechanic. There are minigames to pick locks and hack computers, and the latter requires you to randomly type as fast as you can within the time limit.
* Flash game [http://www.kongregate.com/games/mrcrawfo/hax0r HAX0R] utilizes this trope as its core gameplay mechanic.
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* Or they simply know the keybaord shortcuts for mouse commands. Alt-tab anyone?
** There are a lot of them. A LOT. Even today it is possible to operate Windows without even having a mouse attached to the computer. It's faster than using a mouse and leaves people
* There are some operating system interfaces (like [[wikipedia:Openbox|Openbox]]) that are meant to be controlled with little mouse operation. Additionally, the tab key can move you across fields, which most people don't know/use. Put the two together and you have a system that can be ran for rather more than average without lifting your hands from the keyboard, all the while typing in shortcuts and
** Openbox? Pah. Try [http://dwm.suckless.org dwm] or any of the [[wikipedia:Tiling window manager|Tiling window managers]] for Linux/UNIX.
*** dwm? Try ratpoison. It's specifically designed to completely banish the mouse from GUIs (You can still use the mouse, but all the window management functions and then some are done purely through the keyboard. The mouse is mostly there for apps you run that won't accept any other kind of input, which is, by the way, quite rare in *nix.) and it does a pretty good job of this. dwm is downright mouse-friendly compared to ratpoison. Of course, a great deal of Linux/UNIX fans, this troper included, will sometimes eschew the use of things like the X Window System altogether and do everything, absolutely *everything,* from a console, including watching movies, thanks to the framebuffer.
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