Touch Typing Trainer

Touch typing is typing without looking at the keyboard, each finger owning its own keys. The hard part is not knowing where the letters are but making every one of them automatic, and practice that drills the letters you already find easy wastes most of your time. This trainer keeps a record of how fast you type each letter and builds every lesson around the slowest one.

You start with six letters: e, t, a, o, i and n, the six most common in English text. Every lesson uses only the letters you have, and every word contains the lesson's focus letter, the one furthest below your target speed. Once each letter you have is up to speed, the next most common one joins, and it becomes the focus straight away. The order is English letter frequency in running text: e t a o i n s h r d l c u m w f g y p b v k j x q z.

Each key is timed from the press before it. Holding Shift counts as a keystroke of its own, so a capital is not scored as a slow letter. A pause longer than twelve seconds, or a bounce shorter than 40 milliseconds, is not counted. A letter's speed is smoothed across lessons, each lesson moving it a tenth of the way towards what you just typed, so one lucky lesson cannot unlock the next letter and one bad one cannot lock it again. A letter that has once reached your target stays unlocked for good.

The words are real where they can be. The early lessons have only a handful of real words that fit, so they are filled out with pronounceable made-up words built from a model of which letters follow which in English. Once at least fifteen real words fit, the lessons use only those. The words, and the model, come from the EFF short wordlist by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, used under CC BY 4.0.

Under the focus letter you may see an estimate of how many more lessons it will take to reach your target. It is a straight line through that letter's recent speeds, and it appears only when the line fits well and points the right way, so it says nothing rather than guess. Your lessons are kept in this browser's own storage, on this device only, and nothing is sent anywhere. For a timed test of your overall speed on ordinary passages, use the typing speed test.

For far more, such as other keyboard layouts and languages, capitals, punctuation and numbers, and a history that follows you between devices, keybr.com is free and open source and runs in the browser. It shows ads and runs Google Analytics unless you pay for its premium tier.