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Copyright

typefast is Copyright (C) 2002 Phillip O'Donnell

Licence

typefast is released under the GNU General Public Licence. For more details, please refer to the file COPYING in the source directory.

Introduction

TypeFast typing tutor is a simple program that displays a character, and you have to type that character.

The main points are:

1. You have 5 seconds to type the character correctly, else it times out, and moves on. This is counted as a missed character.
2. If you have either a standard QWERTY or Dvorak layout keyboard, you can set it only chose from letters on the left or right side.
3. You can chose whether to have only uppercase, lowercase, or mixed case prompts.
4. The system gives a higher weighting to characters you have more difficultly with, but I'm not certain if it's noticable.

Install instructions

Change into the directory typefast was extracted into, then type make. I.e:

$ cd typefast-0.1
$ make

If you are logged in as root, you can install it system wide. By default, it installs to /usr/local/bin. If that is not suitable, just copy the typefast binary.

$ make install

If you are not root, either copy the typefast binary to some location in your home directory (and possibly path), or simply leave it in the compile directory and run it from there.

General Usage

Once in the program, you can change the case, hand, and layout settings via function keys.

F2 = Toggle case

        You can view the current case by looking at the lower left-hand 
        corner. If you see "aA", both upper-case and lower-case letters are
        selected from. If you only see "a" or "A", then only lower-case or
        upper-case letters are selected, respectively.

F3 = Toggle hands

        You can view the current hand toggle by looking to the right of the
        case display. If you see "LR", both left-hand and right-hand keys
        will be selected from, according to your current keymap. If you only
        see "L" or "R", then only left-hand or right-hand keys are selected,
        respectively.

        The character history TypeFast stores to avoid too-many quickly
        repeating characters is reduced to 4 in right or left hand mode.
        It will restore this to 10 (or CHAR_HISTORY) on "Both hands" being
        selected.

F4 = Toggle keymap

        The current keymap is displayed directly right of the hand display.
        The current keymap affects the keys selected in either left-hand or
        right-hand mode.

F1 = Exit program

        When you exit the program, it will display some statistics, such as
        your hit and miss counts for each letter, upper and lower cases
        individually.

Bugs and features

This program almost certainly has bugs. If you find any, or you have a feature request you'd like to see, please send me an email. My address is phillip.o@ihug.co.nz - if you email me, please mention typefast in the subject, else it might take me a while to get to it.

If you'd like to contribute, please feel free. There are a lot of improvements that could be made, and all input is welcome. My goal is to make a typing tutor/typing practice program that is better than all the rest.

If there is enough interest, I may be inclined to move to a SourceForge project, and actually spend a lot of time on this. As it is, I only wrote this when I started moving from QWERTY to Dvorak, so it's only a hack at the moment.