typetest-cli

A tiny Monkeytype clone for your terminal made by Claude

What it does

Shows you a line of words. You type them. Correct characters turn green, mistakes turn red. When you finish, it prints your WPM and accuracy.

How it works

• Word list: words.txt holds ~1000 common English words, one giant space-separated blob. On startup the script reads it and splits it into a list.
• Prompt generation: gen_words(n=25) picks n random words from that list and joins them into one string — that's your typing prompt.
• Rendering: Uses Python's built-in curses library to draw text directly to the terminal. Each character in the prompt gets colored based on whether you've typed it yet, and if so, whether it matches:
  • white = not typed yet
  • green = correct
  • red = wrong
• Input loop: Reads one keystroke at a time (get_wch()), updates the "typed" buffer, redraws the screen, and checks for backspace / Esc.
• Scoring: Once you've typed the full prompt, WPM is calculated as (characters typed / 5) / (minutes elapsed) — the standard "5 chars = 1 word" convention — and accuracy is (correct chars / total typed) * 100.

Setup

Requires Python 3 (preinstalled on macOS/Linux; on Windows use WSL, since curses isn't native there).

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/typetest-cli.git
cd typetest-cli
python3 typetest.py

Make sure typetest.py and words.txt stay in the same folder — the script loads the word list relative to its own location.

Customizing the word list

words.txt is just plain text, space- or newline-separated. Add, remove, or swap in your own words and save — no code changes needed.

Controls

• Start typing to begin the timer
• Backspace to fix mistakes
• Esc to quit early

License

MIT — do whatever you want with it.