About

What this is

A typing test where a light follows the words you type, like a lyric as it’s sung, longer and hotter the faster you go. Each test feeds a loop: Track shows whether you are getting faster and what is holding you back, and Practise drills it.

How you’re scored

• Words per minute — correctly typed characters, divided by five, per minute. A word with a wrong letter in it does not count.
• Accuracy — keys right first time, out of every key you pressed. Fixing a mistake does not undo it.
• Every key — the same speed over everything you typed, right or wrong. The gap down to your score is what mistakes cost you.

Nothing is called until there is enough evidence to call it: a letter pair needs a dozen tries before it can be named weak, and a change on Track has to clear what an ordinary good or bad day produces. For what the results look for when your typing is slow, see why is my typing slow.

Modes

seconds, words, quote or zen, which has no clock and ends when you press finish. Punctuation, numbers and code change what you type, and must fix mistakes means a wrong letter won’t go in until you type the right one. All of it is in Settings, beside the length. While you type, everything but the words and the clock fades away, and comes back when you stop or move the mouse.

Keys

• tab — restart: the same test, new words
• enter — the next run, from the results
• enter — finish a zen run
• esc — leave the words (the clock keeps running), or close whatever is open
• ctrl k — every setting and page, by name

Your data

Everything you type stays in this browser unless you sign in. Your first two runs need no account; after that, typing needs one, and it is free. Clearing your browser data clears what is here for good. What is kept: your results and your bests, which keys and letter pairs you miss and how fast you type them, a log of each test’s keystrokes (what Track’s letter pairs are worked out from), your settings, your speed goal if you set one, and the last passage you pasted in to type.

Signed in, this browser sends that profile to the server, the two copies are merged, and the merge comes back. That sync is automatic: a little after each run, and when you open a page. An account keeps its own copy until you delete it on the account page. Runs typed from your own text are the exception: their keystrokes contain your writing, so they never leave this browser.

A keystroke log is biometric data. The rhythm of your typing is distinctive enough to tell you apart from other people. That is why it only leaves this browser once you sign in, and why Track, Practise and your goal are worked out here rather than on a server. The privacy page names everyone who handles it and how to delete it.

An account can also opt in to research, from the account page. It is off until you turn it on. When it is on, the typing you have synced counts towards averages of typists at your speed, such as how quickly most of them type th, and only in groups of 20 people or more. Nothing new is sent, and turning it off takes you out at the next daily update.

Signing out deletes nothing here. That is why a sync asks first when this browser was last synced with a different account: on a shared computer it would otherwise merge the last person's typing into yours. Deleting your account, from the account page, deletes everything it synced too; it does not touch what is in this browser.

To know how many people visit and how fast pages load, keyoke counts page views and load times with the analytics of Vercel, which hosts the site. It uses no cookies, does not follow you to other sites, and sees which page was opened, never what was typed on it.

To know whether people who arrive actually type, keyoke also counts three things itself: that this browser visited today, that a test was started, and that a test was finished, with its mode, whether it was a practice run, and how many seconds it lasted. They are sent to keyoke.com under a random ID this browser made for itself, which is never joined to an account. No score, no accuracy and no text is ever part of it, and if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, none of it is sent at all.

Quotes

Quote mode draws on public-domain works: Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address; Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Five Orange Pips; Bram Stoker, Dracula; Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities; Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre; Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford; H. G. Wells, The Time Machine; Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Shakespeare, Hamlet; The Declaration of Independence.