speed-type

Practice touch/speed typing in GNU Emacs.

Installation

Install speed-type from MELPA with:

M-x package-install RET speed-type

If you prefer to install by hand: Put speed-type.el into a directory specified by the load-path variable. Alternatively, you can add a directory to the variable load-path by (add-to-list 'load-path "ADDITIONAL-DIRECTORY").

If you put the file in "~/.emacs.d/speed-type/speed-type.el" for instance, the following snipped in your .emacs file will load and init the extension.

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/speed-type/speed-type.el")
(require 'speed-type)

Configuration

speed-type can be customized using:

M-x customize-group speed-type RET

you may also want to increase the text scale in speed-type-mode:

(add-hook 'speed-type-mode-hook (lambda () (text-scale-increase 3)))

Running speed-type

Executing M-x speed-type-text will start the typing exercise. A new buffer will open and a random text sample will appear. As you type the text it will change color to show progress and highlight correct and incorrect entries. Timing happens automatically, the clock starts on the first character typed and ends with the last. Statistics like characters typed, words-per-minute, and total time will be shown as soon as the last character is entered.

You can use any buffer or part of it to run speed-type. M-x speed-type-region and M-x speed-type-buffer will do the same thing as speed-type-text, except they take the text sample you've picked. This works for programming code buffers/regions as well.

speed-type-buffer by default will only take a random portion of the buffer - If you want the whole buffer, use C-u speed-type-buffer.

Random samples are taken from Project Gutenberg. A small number of books will be downloaded on demand and stored in "~/emacs.d/speed-type". They will only be downloaded once.

speed-type-region will start a speed-type session with the text from the selected region.

speed-type-top-x (or -100/-1000) lets you practice the top X words for the selected language.

Reading PDFs using speed-type

File must first be converted to text and processed to remove unwanted spaces and characters:

(defun speedtype-open-pdf-txt (arg)
  "Open PDF file ARG as a txt file and clean text for speed-type, txt is stored in same dir."
    (interactive "fpdf: ")
    (shell-command
     (format (concat "pdftotext " (replace-regexp-in-string " " "?\ " arg) " -layout")))
    (let ((result (replace-regexp-in-string "pdf" "txt" arg)))
      (f-write-text (replace-regexp-in-string "" "" (with-temp-buffer (insert-file-contents result) (buffer-string))) 'utf-8 result);remove ^L control char
      (f-write-text (remove-excess-spaces (with-temp-buffer (insert-file-contents result) (buffer-string))) 'utf-8 result);remove excess spaces
      (f-write-text (remove-empty-lines   (with-temp-buffer (insert-file-contents result) (buffer-string))) 'utf-8 result)
      (find-file result)))

use speed-type-region on section of text, [n] key will move to next section.