What free program for learning how to type would you recommend?

Question

I would like to devote some of my time to improve my typing skill. Has anyone a good experience with some freeware tool ?

Answer 1

This may sound odd, but the program(s) which improved my typing most was prolific use of instant messengers & IRC. Sending messages back and forth constantly tends to improve your skill by default.

Answer 2

I would highly recommend 'Typer Shark'. Great fun!

Typer Shark

Answer 3

Check out these questions:

• Touch typing software recommendations
• Should programmers be excellent typists?

Answer 4

I don't know any good/free tool, but there are a couple of nice websites, where you can (try to) improve your typing skills.

One example is speedtest

Answer 5

There is a very good although quite old one called GNU Typist

It is open source, works in *nix and Windows

It comes with tutorials for QUERTY and Dvorak, speed drills, and you can make your own lessons also.

The two drawbacks are:

• It's only command line (although there is a GUI version for Mac, and probably there are also GUIs for other OSs, but I haven't checked)
• I haven't been able to get it to work with non-english characters, but I'm sure it is more a problem with my terminal software than with the software itself.

Answer 6

You can also play typeracer

The competition adds some fun to the practice.

Answer 7

A knife (it's possible to get one for free, you don't need anything fancy) - just erase labels on your keyboard keys. Seriously, it's often used as a joke, but it does work.

Use curved keyboard (like MS Natural) for better effect.

Typing tools are generally useless for developers, who get enough keyboard practice from coding.

Answer 8

It's not a freeware tool, but you can buy it for cheap online: Typing of the Dead. It's a port of House of the Dead 2 and you type words / sentences to kill the zombies. There is some gameplay footage on YouTube.