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New Typing Program

  • Started by tristesse
  • 36 Replies:
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  • From: Oslo, Norway
  • Registered: 21-Dec-2008
  • Posts: 12
simonh said:

Edit: False alarm. Speed is back to being as erratic as ever :(

Hehe, had my hopes up there for a second.

Personally I definitely *have* enjoyed a steady increase in my graphs over the two weeks I have been using my program now. :) Getting 80+wpm average on random texts which was nigh impossible before, and I've even scored a 104wpm! Metamorphosis is the easiest text and my average has gone from ~77 to ~87wpm on it. Kinda trying to type Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in order and over 350 typed excerpts (yes, I type a lot) my average has gone from ~72 to ~82.

Unrelated, I have been trying to plug Colemak in the wiki pages. Someone added the project to reddit the other day and I got 10k visitors and 3000 downloads, hopefully I can help raise Colemak awareness. :) The colemak.com page seems to have been edited recently though and a lot of links have been removed from the sidebar (and some of the ones left link to empty pages)...

tomlu said:

Occasionally there are some non-printable characters in the text that show up as [square]. When such a character occurs, it is nigh impossible to proceed with that piece of text. It might be prudent to filter() the text prior to it getting to the user.

What kind of non-printables? Is the imported text in UTF-8? As in, are they control characters in the text or is it a font issue?

"Weeding out" stuff is harder than just filtering, because if someone decides to practice Navaho or Mongolian, that's their business and I can't really distinguish those characters from "noise". Of course that will probably break the sentence detection, but still... Likewise I try to be careful imposing too much formatting etc. on the texts as I can't really say for sure that the users don't want it there.

If you are not typing in-order you can filter them out by disabling/deleting them via the regex. See the wiki Questions page. Other than that I just recommend filtering and improving the source texts and re-importing.

In the future I might split text importing into two distinct parts: one for importing verbatim lessons, and one for importing more specifically "texts" a la Gutenberg with options to filter non-printable ascii and impose formatting removing double-spaces, etc... I dunno, it's just an idea at this point.

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It's definitely improving my speed. I got my first ever 68wpm today! And the first five tests of the day were all over 60wpm. I think the problem is I try to push myself to go faster and then make lots of silly mistakes. How about a 'brutal' mode? Any mistakes and you have to start the text again. That should help with accuracy.

"It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in." - Earl of Chesterfield

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I love this program; I would also like to see a brutal mode for errors, or perhaps an option to set how much of your work you lose when you make an error (from 0 to 100%), set to 0 by default.

I look forward to this program developing.  My four dreams for it would be (1) easier to switch between keyboard layouts while training, keep the stats separate, without having to click around.  If it could tell which layout I'm in and split it accordingly that would be ideal, or even force me to switch between layouts.  I would use it to practice multiple layouts simultaneously.  Weird I know, but I would use it.  (2) Modes change in a pattern like Typing Master--variety would keep it interesting; (3) Being able to exclude certain keys, and progressively add in more (find sentences or practices that don't use the excluded letters, or create nonsense sentences out of them); (4) A fancy visible keyboard for the layout you're in, showing fingering via some color pattern.  This would again help use it to learn a new layout.

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  • From: Viken, Norway
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I'm not sure, but I have a feeling that fancy graphical keyboards isn't in the spirit of Tristesse. I could be wrong.  ;)

If you want a nice little helping graphic, consider Portable Keyboard Layout. It has finger coloring, and will show all shift states. If you make a novel layout, you can convert it to a PKL file with images and all - but you'll need to use perl (or get help from Farkas... but then you shouldn't be pestering him with a bunch of layouts that keep changing, hehe).

*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
*** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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If a program handles it for me, that would be convenient, that's all.  If I'm practicing multiple layouts like I described, having to switch windows and open up and minimize and rearrange different keyboard images would be tedious.  There's nothing non-keyboard-agnostic about showing the user the keyboard they're using or helping them learn it; the program is awesome but to learn a new layout I currently have to use something else, that's all.  I believe its power could extend to other uses like I described.

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  • From: Viken, Norway
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Rearrange? Huh?

To switch layouts in PKL, I'd press the chosen hotkey (I use Ctrl-Shift-F2; others use LCtrl+RCtrl etc). The image would switch automatically. No idea how much more convenient you'd expect things to be. I could switch layout (and image) as often as I wanted to even in the middle of a page.

As long as all that functionality is available (in Windows at least) maybe it'd be a bit superfluous to recode it all? Unless Tristesse wants to have it in his package, for instance so it'd be available for multiple platforms. And, if Tristesse should happen to be interested in multiple layouts, your suggestion of stats for each one of course. I guess the multi-layout people aren't that many however...

My suggestion: Steal the distribution curve from KeyHero! That thing's damn sexy. It's very interesting on that site because there it shows the distribution of a community, but it'd be pretty nifty showing your individual speed distribution as well methinks. Might be instructive?

Last edited by DreymaR (05-May-2009 18:26:16)

*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
*** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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As I already said, the problem is mainly that I would have to switch databases very slowly in amphetype.  Multi layout should not be that rare of a thing.  Many people should want to maintain their Qwerty speed as they learn a better layout.

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I missed the part where you said that databases are your main issue. Good point about the 'old-versus-new-layout' people. It might be scripted up, but as you say it'd be a nice addition to the main program!

*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
*** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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Okay, I took a look at Amphetype. I does handle multiple databases nicely as far as I can see. What you'd have to do is simply to establish a database for each layout you want to learn and then start Amphetype with a command line switch! From the program's 'Database' tab: 'You can also specify a database name at the command line with the '--database=<file>' switch.' For Windows, that means adding the switch to the end of the path of a shortcut. So all you'd need to do would be to keep multiple shortcuts and you could even start up multiple instances of Amphetype at the same time I think.

For a help image and easy layout switching, PKL is still a Windows user's best bet as far as I'm aware of.

*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
*** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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DreymaR, when you talk about layout switching in PKL, do you mean the loading of another (separate) layout file using the changeLayoutHotkey, or do you have a clever trick to have multiple layouts in a single PKL layout file with a hotkey to toggle them?

I'm currently using the former approach to switch between colemak & rulemak, but I don't like it since when I press my hotkey (left+right Control keys combined), layout 1 is immediatly deactivated, and I get qwerty until the layout 2 file is loaded (which is often very slow).

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I'm talking about the full switch like what you're doing. Get a better computer...  ;)

It'd be possible to make a dual-layout, however. My way would be to use SGCaps - in my current MSKLC layout that's used to switch between greek and latin characters. I'm working on how to implement the ScrollLock key as another state key (the 'Kana' VKEY) so that I could put in Kyrillic, Hebraic and even another set. If you'd like to use that trick for multiple layouts however, you'd run into problems with the VKEYs. Can't redefine those on the fly, so one layout would typically have correct VKEY assignments and the other one not.

In your case, the Rulemak would (hopefully!) use the same VKEY assignments as the Colemak, and it's a go. SGCaps is your friend I'd say. Note that keeping the CapsLock key as it is in QWERTY may lead to unwanted switching. I use PKL's 'Extend' functionality to switch layouts with CapsLock+Esc instead.

*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
*** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

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Thank you tristesse for this nice program. I like this a lot.

The required accuracy to pass a text or a review, ability to type a whole novel and read them through typing is excellent options.

Amphetype detailed statistics is very helpful.

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