How do programmers code quickly?

Learn to type: Forget the sentiments, you’ve got to up your typing speed to code faster. There are great softwares you can practice with - I grew up on Mavis Bacon (and some typewriting lessons in Secondary School)

• 1. Know thy keyboard: Nothing slows your race down like a broken leg, nothing slows down your typing like a bad keyboard layout. I once had to type on a keyboard with a bad left shift key. It wasn’t very funny.
• 2. Know thy tools: Know the tools of your trade. Especially, learn all of the useful shortcuts for your IDE/Editor. Know your OS. I use command+tab on mac to switch quickly between Netbeans and Google Chrome. On windows, that would be alt+tab. Some code editors allow you to write macros which are steps you record and attach to a keyboard shortcut.
• 3. Understand the language: Some programming languages like Assembly language and Lisp allow you to write text-replacement macros. This means you can write many lines of code and attach them to just one or two lines of text. Wherever those lines of text appear, they are replaced with your many, many lines of code.
• 4. Generate code: You don’t have to write code over and over again. Write a script to generate your code - especially if its the same lines of code you’ll be writing over and over again - and just run that script instead. I’ve written Perl scripts which I use to generate Java code.
• 5. Know thy problems: This is indispensable. Solve a lot of problems, get familiar with them. As you garner experience on these problems, you can type up solutions much faster.
• 6. Use a dependency manager: What you want to do has probably been done and is likely living in somebody’s repository. Use it.
• 7. Plan, plan, plan: When you see a programmer breeze quickly through code, he has spent several hours planning his solutions/algorithms before he types the very first character of his code. Trust me, planning will save you headaches aplenty.