Typist

Typist does not count the first character of an exercise. Also, if you pause for a few seconds between characters, it will not count the next character after the pause as part of the exercise. It does this to try to maintain sensible keystroke timing information where you might take breaks in mid-exercise.

By default, Typist will try to behave like a word processor. It treats a space character as correctly typed at the end of a line, and will condense multiple spaces are condensed down into a single space. If you hit Return at the end of a line, the cursor moves forward to the next significant character to be typed, skipping over blank lines and paragraph indentation.

Typist is a program to provide you with instruction and practice in using a computer keyboard. If you cannot touch type, Typist contains all the tutorials and practice text you will need in order to master this skill. And if you can already touch type, then you can use the program to sharpen your keyboard skills, and improve your typing speed and efficiency. The Statistics Window displays a complete analysis of all of this timing information collected on exercises.

Typist maintains keystroke statistics for individual keys, for each finger, and globally. You can use the View pull down menu to decide which set of statistics you want to see in the window.

Typist offers a number of alternative and complementary lesson series. The Control Window allows you to select which lesson series is currently active, and within a lesson series allows you to select a particular lesson. Beneath the window's menu bar is a toolbar. Using the toolbar, you can select the lesson series that is active, and move forwards and backwards through the lessons in that series using the Previous and Next buttons.

Typist times each keystroke, and at the end of the exercise, it displays information about how many errors you made when typing the exercise and your typing speed and adjusted speed in Words Per Minute (WPM). Your raw typing speed is calculated as the number of keystrokes you made, divided by five, divided again by the time in minutes taken to complete the exercise. The adjusted WPM is calculated in the same way, except that one word is taken away for each single character typing error you made.