MonkeyLearn

Type your way through real books on MonkeyType - and actually learn something while practicing.

MonkeyLearn is a small Windows desktop app that holds your books, slices them into typing-sized passages, and feeds them to your clipboard one Copy at a time. You paste each passage into MonkeyType's custom text mode and type; the app keeps your bookmark, per-chapter progress, and shelf of books. The typing itself always happens on the real MonkeyType site - this is a companion, not a typing engine.

The interface is a deliberate love letter to Windows 98/XP: beveled buttons, engraved group boxes, segmented progress bars, a gradient title bar, and a PictoChat-style frame around the text you are about to type.

Download: grab MonkeyLearn.exe from the latest release - no install, starts with an empty bookshelf.

How to use it

1. Start MonkeyLearn. Click a book on the shelf, or Add Book... to import your own - EPUB, PDF, and TXT are supported, parsed entirely on your machine.
2. Pick a passage length: Short (60 words), Medium (150), Long (300), XL (600), Whole chapter, or a custom word count. Pick content: Prose, Code, or Everything (the toggle hides itself for books with no code).
3. Press Begin. The first passage is already on your clipboard.
4. Set up MonkeyType (once per session):
   • On monkeytype.com, pick custom in the mode bar above the words, then click change - the custom text editor opens.
   • Paste the passage (Ctrl+V).
   • Turn off any shuffle/randomize option so the text stays in book order, and leave the word limit empty so the whole passage is used.
   • If the passage has line breaks (code), enable replace control characters - MonkeyLearn copies line breaks as literal \n marks, and this setting turns them back into real line breaks. The app reminds you when a passage needs it.
   • Confirm, and type.
5. Back in MonkeyLearn, press Done, next (or Enter): your progress is recorded and the next passage is already on the clipboard. Paste it into the same custom text editor and keep going - that is the whole loop.

Tip: MonkeyType's custom text editor can also save a text under a name (the "saved texts" list). Saving a chapter there is handy when you want to retype it for speed later without touching your reading position in MonkeyLearn.

Note: Skip, Back, and the Left/Right arrow keys only move you around - they never count as progress. Only Done, next (or Enter) records a passage as typed.

Shortcuts on the passage view: C copy again, Enter done + next, Left/Right back/skip, Up/Down and PgUp/PgDn scroll the text, Esc contents. The window is drawn by the app itself - drag it by the blue title bar, resize with the grip in the bottom-right corner.

How it works

A book is imported once into a stream of blocks (headings, prose paragraphs, code listings) and stored as JSON in %APPDATA%\MonkeyLearn\books\:

• EPUB: the app reads the book's own manifest for reading order and its table of contents for chapter names. Figures, captions, and tables are dropped; typographic characters are normalized to plain ASCII so every character is typeable.
• PDF: chapters come from the PDF's own outline (bookmarks), drilling past "Part I"-style groupings to the real chapter level; running headers, footers, and page numbers are stripped by detecting lines that repeat across pages; hard-wrapped lines are rebuilt into paragraphs and hyphenated words rejoined. Scanned PDFs without a text layer are rejected with a pointer to OCR tools rather than imported as garbage. Extraction quality still varies with how the PDF was made - prefer EPUB when you have both.
• TXT: paragraphs split on blank lines; lines like "Chapter 5" become chapter breaks, and books without them are cut into navigable parts.

Passages are then built live, on every settings change: whole sentences (and code blocks) are packed in book order up to your word target, breaking only at a sentence end or a chapter end, with short chapter tails folded into the previous passage. Your bookmark is stored as a position in the book rather than a passage number, so changing passage length never loses your place.

Progress lives in %APPDATA%\MonkeyLearn\state.json. Nothing ever leaves your computer.

Building from source

Requires Python 3.12+ on Windows with WebView2 (preinstalled on Windows 11).

pip install pywebview pyperclip pypdf pyinstaller
cd typing/app
python main.py             # run from source
pyinstaller --noconfirm --onefile --windowed --add-data "ui.html;." --icon monkeylearn.ico -n MonkeyLearn main.py

No book text ships in this repository, and none is needed: the app starts with an empty shelf and you add books through Add Book... (EPUB, PDF, or TXT). Optionally, python make_data.py builds a bundled starter book from an EPUB you place in the repository root - add --add-data "data.json;." to the pyinstaller command to bake it in.

Themes

The Appearance section on the shelf offers four classic Windows schemes (Luna Blue, Olive Green, Silver, and Midnight - a dark mode) plus a dropdown of 141 palettes from MonkeyType's official themes, each one re-derived into the full retro widget system (bevels, title bar, selection, progress blocks) from its core colors. Themes with too little contrast for a dense 11px UI are filtered out at build time. Theme palettes are the work of the MonkeyType project and its contributors.

Running on Linux

The code is portable (config lives in ~/.config/MonkeyLearn on Linux, %APPDATA%\MonkeyLearn on Windows), but so far it has only been tested on Windows 11 - reports welcome. To run from source on Linux you need:

• GTK WebKit for pywebview: sudo apt install python3-gi gir1.2-webkit2-4.1 (or use the Qt backend: pip install pywebview[qt])
• A clipboard helper for pyperclip: sudo apt install xclip (X11) or wl-clipboard (Wayland)
• Then: pip install pywebview pyperclip pypdf and python3 typing/app/main.py

The app draws its own window frame; if your window manager handles frameless windows poorly, set MONKEYLEARN_SYSTEM_FRAME=1 to use the normal OS frame instead. A Linux binary can be built with PyInstaller on a Linux machine using the same command as the Windows build.

License

MIT - see LICENSE. Theme palettes belong to the MonkeyType project and its contributors. MonkeyLearn is an independent companion tool, not affiliated with MonkeyType.

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Developed with the help of Claude, Anthropic's AI coding assistant.