I usually prefer to be navigator than driver. It's the navigator that does the high level thinking. The one at the keyboard is the one who's usually better at typing and writing out the design patterns that are agreed upon. Of course we did swap roles routinely, maybe several times a day. Oh and to top it off we switched pairing partners every week or two. It was a brutal experiment but I learned a lot and I'd say it was a great success.

Have you tried plugging in a second keyboard and taking over where necessary? I do a lot of remote work in which my colleague and I work on the same computer and it's quite useful for either of us to jump in with our own keyboard (and mouse). It does take a bit of occasional verbal negotiation to agree on who really knows what to do (and can do it fastest) but if you communicate well then it's pretty easy.

Damn I wish I had a relationship with someone like that.

Right I only call using the same computer pair programming. Now working remote (with Tuple app) it's still two keyboards/mice on one computer (sometimes mine, sometimes theirs), though it's infrequent for specific tasks.

The wildest thing I experienced once was this experimental “two cursors, two highlights, two clipboards” setup. I badly wish that had caught on. It was like Google Docs but Local Multiplayer.

One of my previous employers, Dynaboard, built approximately that.

The Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30261598

Tuple.app does this. It's pricey but an excellent product.

If you enjoy Tuple, we just silently open-sourced Hopp (one of the maintainers here), we are still in Beta era, but would love some feedback!

I sometimes wish the separate clipboards could be turned off, or have a way of pasting from the other's clipboard.

Can you say more about your setup? Does it require extra hardware/software?

We're just using TeamViewer. I connect remotely to my colleague's computer while they are sitting in front of their keyboard.

There is evidence that two people on the keyboard can increase productivity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl6rsi7BEtk

Of course I knew which video it was before even clicking.

I was rather expecting it to be this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnJnejHhjtI

What about an editor that is designed for multiple people to edit the same document? Tie the second keyboard, the second mouse, and a second cursor as resources together and independently edit?

I do this, but with a second monitor and second machine, and then we use git to synchronize our work

With VS Code and IntelliJ you can even do it in the same documents at the same time

Just a reminder for everyone, you can do this with tmux. So you could even just sit next to each other (or not) and be on your own machines.

I find that working with people who are smarter than I am helps a lot with this.

It works both ways. Even for the 'smarter' person, they have to form their ideas clearly in order to communicate it to be understood. By themselves they could just start writing random classes that feel like they might be part of the solution and get themselves in corners more often.

"no the other one, down a bit, no the one above, no go back..."

This is why you need to learn vim commands /hj

Calling out explicit line numbers and zoom annotation tools help with this

for me it's not that I think faster, it's just that I will check 10 things really fast and exclude the "no it can't be there" things - because that's usually where it is. So if somebody else is holding the mouse and keyboard, I would then have to convince them that these things that they are convinced are fine need checking.

I really hate this work of convincing them, because it's much faster to check it first and explain why it was a good idea later once I've fixed the problem.

I find the less dominant person just switches off, stops thinking and just becomes a keyboard with about 20x the latency and 10% the speed and accuracy.