about

A typing trainer where the next word is pinned, not the one you are typing — so you read ahead while your hands finish the current word. That is the precursor skill to entering a whole word at once, and therefore to chording.

Why the offset

Most typing trainers show you the character you are about to type, which is all a character-at-a-time typist needs. A chord is different: it produces a whole word in one gesture, so it cannot begin until the whole word is already in mind. Pinning the next word is meant to build that habit.

Whether the offset actually helps a conventional typist is an open question, not a claim. A caret-pinned display — the one that pins the word you are typing — ships alongside it as a control, so the two can be compared rather than argued about.

Prior art

The idea is adapted from Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), the speed-reading technique that holds text at a fixed point so the eye stops moving. typefoon departs from it in one deliberate way: RSVP shows a single word at a time, and losing the surrounding words costs you parafoveal preview — the reason RSVP hurts comprehension. So three to four words stay visible ahead of the pin.

Word list attribution

The English and Spanish word lists are derived from the Leipzig Corpora Collection, created by the Natural Language Processing Group at Universität Leipzig, and used under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY).

• English — eng_news_2023_100K
• Spanish — spa_news_2023_100K

These lists are not the corpora. Each is a filtered subset: proper nouns, numerals, abbreviations, contraction fragments and profanity are removed, the remainder is case-folded and length-bounded, and the thousand most frequent survivors are kept. The filtering changes the set, so any judgement of the result belongs to typefoon and not to the source.

No word data is taken from monkeytype. Its repository licence does not reliably govern its language data, and at least one language file there carries an embedded third-party restriction that contradicts the repository licence.

Colophon

Built on the SvelteKit stack and self-hosted. Nothing you type is transmitted or stored — there are no accounts, and results live in the page until you leave it.