There are “how fast can you type” tests online, e.g. 10 Fast Fingers, but these measure how fast you can type a random collection of words that you have no prior knowledge of. – But how fast do you type in your typical activities? When you’re entering commands at the shell prompt? When chatting on IRC? When drafting an E-Mail or a LaTeX document?

This is a simple Linux Kernel module providing a file /proc/typespeed which, every time you read it (e.g. with cat), will give you your current typing speed and the number of characters typed in total since loading the module. Since I’m hardly ever typing at full speed for 60 seconds without pause, I decided to print out three intermediate “per minute” stats:

1. Keypresses in last 10 seconds * 60 / 10
2. Keypresses in last 30 seconds * 60 / 30
3. Keypresses in last 60 seconds

Thus, you get three values, adjusted for “keys per minute”. The fourth value will increase monotonically. The format is:

10s-average SP 30s-average SP 60s-average SP total NL

E.g. right now, while I’m writing this README file, my file displays:

$ cat /proc/typespeed
336 272 222 2429

(Yeah, I know. It’s slow. Slower than I thought.)

This should be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: This is a Kernel module. One that registers itself to listen to keyboard and mouse events. Be careful with this stuff. In particular, it’s probably a very bad idea to just type make and sudo insmod ./typespeed.ko. This could be malicious code… Sending your precious SSH passwords to a public pastebin site. Or installing itself in the initrd so that it can get your encrypted hard drive passphrase, then pasting that to some pastebin site. Just saying.