Amphetype

Amphetype is an advanced typing practice program.

Features include:

• Type your favorite novel!

  One of the core ideas behind Amphetype was to not just use boring "stock texts" for typing practice, but to allow me to practice on texts that I actually want to read. So one feature is the ability to import whole novels (for example from Project Gutenberg) and have Amphetype automatically generate bite-sized lessons from the text. For example, when I was learning the Colemak keyboard layout, I typed The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka!

• Typing statistics.

  It provides the basic typing statistics (accuracy and WPM) across keys, trigrams, and words. It also tries to identify parts that break your flow and what impact these "viscous" combinations have on your typing speed overall. It also shows a graphs of progress over time.

• Generate lessons from past statistics.

  Amphetype features an advanced lesson generator where you can generate texts based on your past performance. Generate blocks of text to target practice your slowest words, trigrams, or keys!

• Layout-agnostic.

  Amphetype doesn't care what keyboard or layout you use, it only looks at how you use it.

• Highly customizable in functionality, looks, and feel.

Installing

GNU/Linux

Install via pip:

$ pip install --user amphetype

Note that Amphetype requires Python 3.6+.

Windows

Check out the releases for an installer.

MacOS

Here I will pretty much just copy instructions out of Google, because I have no experience with OSX.

(If you're an experienced user, the Linux instructions above are probably enough.)

1. First install Homebrew.
2. Then (still in a terminal) install Python 3:

   $ brew install python
   

3. Hopefully you will now have a command called pip (or pip3?), so use that like in the Linux instructions. If it doesn't work, try something like this:

   $ python3 -m pip install amphetype
   

4. Run the program:

   $ amphetype
   

   (Might also work to find it with Finder? I don't really know.)

Resurrected?

Yes, I originally made this program 12 years ago here. I've updated it somewhat and implemented some features that were requested back then, and upgraded the code to use Python 3 and Qt5 (instead of Python 2 and Qt4).

Google Code has gone read-only though, so I am unable to do anything about what's shown there.

Other Links

Review of (old) Amphetype: https://forum.colemak.com/topic/2201-training-with-amphetype/

My own inspiration for switching to a different keyboard layout and why I made Amphetype:

• http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-secret.html

• https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-are-typists-first-programmers-second/

• https://www.ryanheise.com/colemak/

Screenshots

TODO: make actually attractive screenshots.

Using various themes: