marshl/keyboard_distance

Script for finding keyboard travel distance and angle for different words

keyboard_distance

Python tool to determine the distance on a keyboard that word Inspired by Why the longest English word is PAPAL and SPA is the pointiest. By Matt Parker on Stand Up Maths (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf2H9WZSIyw&t=845s)

Table of Contents

1. About the Project
2. Getting Started
3. Usage
4. Contributing

About The Project

This is a script that can be used to figure out the keyboard travel distance of a word, as well as finding the word with the smallest or largest distance among a group of words. It can also find words that don't have lines between letters that intersect, and also find the angle between the lines and the smallest or largest angles of all words.

This project was inspired by the video Why the longest English word is PAPAL and SPA is the pointiest. by Matt Parker on his YouTube Channel Stand-Up Maths https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf2H9WZSIyw&t=845s

Getting Started

This script is written to not require any third-party dependencies, so you don't need to install any modules or create a virtualenv, however it is still recommended that you do so.

Prerequisites

Before you start you will need to make sure you have the following installed:

• Python 3.8

Installation

1. Clone the repo and cd into it

   git clone https://github.com/marshl/keyboard_distance.git
   cd keyboard_distance

2. Create a virtual environment

   python -m virtualenv --python $(which python3.8) venv

Usage

First usage

The first time you run keyboard_distance it will download a list of words from dwyl on GitHub here https://github.com/dwyl/english-words It will then also create a "simplified" list, that is a list with only words that only contain letters (words with numbers, apostrophes, hyphens etc. are excluded) in order to speed up processing.

Run the program with:

python keyboard_distance

Your firewall may block the word file being downloaded, if it does, you can download the words manually from here https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dwyl/english-words/master/words.txt and the put that file in the same directory you execute the script from named words.txt. The simplified file will then be generated as normal.

Simple usage

Running the program without any arguments will by default find words with the longest total travel distance

python keyboard_distance

It will give the answer in the form of a list of words with the total travel distance in centimeters, and the average distance per movement (a movement is the distance from one key to another, so a word with 4 letters has 3 movements)

Instead of using all English words, you can provide your only list of words after the program name:

python keyboard_distance the quick onyx goblin jumps over the lazy dwarf

For a full list of optional arguments, like searching by angle use the help command

python keyboard_distance --help

Advanced usage

Here are some more advanced usage examples:

Finding the largest non-intersecting word:

python keyboard_distance --non-intersecting

Finding 100 words with the greatest angle between all movements:

python keyboard_distance --word-count=100 --compare-angle --smaller-than=10

Contributing

I'm not sure what to put here. Create a pull request if you want I suppose? Or raise issue or something.

Linting

To lint the project, run (you will need to install pylint into your virtual environment first).

python -m pylint keyboard_distance test 

All committed code should have first been auto-formatted with black. This repo doesn't have a pre-commit hook, but please try to remember to run black before committing:

python -m black keyboard_distance/__main__.py

Tests

To run the tests, run

python -m pytest