GNU's gtypist program is a great way for Linux users to improve their typing speed right from the command line, and is widely available for every distribution. I personally used it extensively when I switched from practicing law to programming and discovered that the keyboard was full of keys I'd basically never needed before. (If you need convincing of the importance of typing speed to programming, please see the post Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret.
However, despite fitting so perfectly into a programming/command-line workflow, gtypist doesn't actually have a lot of content focused on programmer-specific keys. This lesson fills that gap.
This series of eleven lessons focuses on special character keys that are not covered much in the previous lessons but that are useful for programming. Specifically, it reviews the following keys (which were previously covered):
! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) ? / " ' :
and it introduces the following keys:
+ - _ = > < { } ] [ ` ~ \ |
The first two lessons are review; the next six introduce the new keys,
and the final three provide long-form practice. Where possible, the
lessons that introduce new keys include typing exercises consisting of
actual code, since that is where these characters will see the most use.
The three long-form practice exercises contain, respectively, a serries
of "Hello, World!" programs in a variety of languages, an excerpt from
a malloc program (written in C) and the entirety of a very simple
compiler (written in JavaScript).
At the moment, the programming samples are biased towards languages with C-like syntax—please feel free to submit a pull request if you would like other languages to be featured more prominently.
I submitted this lesson as a patch to the gtypist mailing list and received positive feedback; it is possible that it will be included in the base installation at some point. However, gtypist is not under extremely active development, so I decided to post it here in the meantime.
Running this lesson requires gtypist, which is available from nearly all package managers of directly from the gtypist website
After installing gtypist, you can run this file by following gtypist's
directions for running an external typing script. Specifically, download
the p.typ file to a directory of your choice and then add
the path to the file as a final argument to gtypist. If you would
prefer not to type the full path to the script file, you can copy it
to the same directory that holds gtypist's other lessons (usually
/usr/share/gtypist or /usr/local/share/gtypist). After doing so,
you can run the lesson by supplying just the filename as a final argument
to gtypist.