Improve your typing

Years ago, when Shashank Sharma had more hair on his scalp than cheeks, he decided to master touch-typing. With these tools, so can you.

- Shashank Sharma

Touch-typing is the ability to type without looking at the keyboard. At the very least, this requires you to be familiar with key placements, but more importantly, it takes a lot of practice to be able to type without too many mistakes. Another coveted typing skill is the number of words you can type in a minute, referred to as words per minute (wpm). Apart from various graphical tools and websites designed to help you improve your typing skills, you’ll also find various games aimed at children to help familiarise them with the keyboard.

However, if you want to get better at touch-typing and even improve your wpm standing from the comfort of your terminal emulator or CLI, try your hand at these wonderful utilities that are designed to improve your prowess with the keyboard.

The oldest project on our list is GNU Typist, which was first released in 2002. The latest release, version 2.9.5, was published in 2014, but don’t let that deter you – GNU Typist is an excellent typing tutor. However, if you prefer newer projects, Ttyper, TT (see below) or Thokr might suit you better.

In addition to the English language, you can also use these tools to master other tongues, such as Spanish, and even programming languages such as Rust, PHP and others.

Learning with GNU Typist 

Many distros carry GNU Typist, or Gtypist, in their software repositories. If your distribution is the rare exception, that’s all right. Head over to the project’s website (