pacetype 0.2.0

Type text and emojis character-by-character using clipboard paste.

Pacetype 🐢

Simulates typing text and emojis character-by-character with adjustable delays. Uses the clipboard for robust cross-platform compatibility, especially for special characters and emojis that often cause issues with direct key simulation.

🤔 Why Pacetype?

Automating keyboard input with libraries like pyautogui can be tricky when dealing with emojis or complex Unicode characters. Direct key simulation doesn't always map correctly across different OSs and input methods.

pacetype simplifies this by:

1. Copying one character (including emojis) at a time to the system clipboard.
2. Simulating the standard "paste" keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+V or Cmd+V).
3. Waiting for a specified interval (if provided) before the next character.

This clipboard-based method ensures greater reliability for a wide range of characters.

🚀 Installation

pip install pacetype

✨ Simple Usage

Using pacetype is straightforward. Just import it and call it directly with the text you want to type.

import pacetype
import time

# Give yourself a moment to switch to the target window
print("Pacetyping in 3 seconds...")
time.sleep(3)

# Type text with the default delay (~0.1 seconds between characters)
pacetype("Hello World! 👋")

# Type text with a custom delay (0.5 seconds between characters)
pacetype("Typing slowly... 🐢", interval=0.5)

# Pacetype inherently has a small delay due to the copy/paste mechanism,
# even if interval is 0.0.
pacetype("Fast typing!", interval=0.0)

print("Typing finished!")

Key Points:

• Default Delay: By default, pacetype uses a 0.05 second delay between characters (pacetype("text") is equivalent to pacetype("text", interval=0.05)). This is defined in pacetype/__init__.py.
• Inherent Delay: Even if you set interval=0.0, there will always be a small, system-dependent delay between characters due to the time it takes to perform the clipboard copy and paste operations. There is no artificial time.sleep(0.01) added when the interval is 0.

⚙️ Features

• Emoji & Unicode Support: Reliably types emojis and complex characters via the clipboard.
• Adjustable Delay: Control typing speed with the optional interval argument.
• Simple Callable API: Just import pacetype and use pacetype("your text", interval=...).
• Cross-Platform: Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux (thanks to pyperclip and pyautogui).

⚠️ Important Notes

• Window Focus: The target application window (e.g., text editor, browser, chat) must have keyboard focus when pacetype() is executing.
• Clipboard Use: Pacetype relies heavily on the system clipboard. Any content you manually copy while it's running will be overwritten. The clipboard will contain the last character typed after the script finishes.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: Assumes standard Ctrl+V (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+V (macOS) paste shortcuts are active.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions, issues, and feature requests are welcome!

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.