KB Trainer

kb-trainer

History of creation Idea

In the fall of 2020, my beloved wife gave me the new wonderful keyboard Kinesis Advantage 2 . And it immediately became quite clear that I can’t type on it. I remembered how to type letters because I’ve mastered touch typing. All other keys were out of their usual place. And my productivity was dropped to almost zero. I felt like I use the keyboard for the first time in my life. Since I have already known touch typing, I decided to update my skills on a new keyboard by taking a suitable course. I found a trainer and even started to press the letters, but then I realized that the trainer has no exercise for service buttons. Then I looked for other trainers and tried many… the same result. The Spacebar and Enter and the upper/lower case switch are somehow taken into account by all these numerous courses, but many other switches and extended characters are completely ignored. All the trainers I found allow me to learn how to type letters, numbers, and a little punctuation. This isn’t enough! And I decided to create the trainer that trains my hands to use the entire keyboard. In fact, Enter, Control and Alt buttons have no differences from the letter buttons. This is new concept…

Concept

This trainer aims for you to get used to your keyboard. There is no specific typing method, just you and your keyboard. So, it suits if you wish to type with two fingers, and if you wish use ten fingers on each of three hands, I suppose some users could be from Alpha Centauri, yeah :) It suits for touch typing too.

To get used to any keyboard, it is necessary to press each key many times. In the beginning, you consciously pay attention to this, then the hands “remember” the key’s location on the keyboard and after that, they act automatically.

The trainer is flexible. It allows you to practice with any physical keyboard, any language, any keyboard layout, and any typing principles.

Target audience Who is this product for?

It is made for anyone who wants to use the keyboard more effectively. For anyone who wants, needs or has to type a lot of texts. For anyone who uses keyboard shortcuts with all its keys, including the toggle keys (Shift, Control, Alt), navigation keys and function keys.

The trainer doesn’t know anything about the configuration of your keyboard or keys layout, it could be the classic QWERTY or some specific like Dvorak or Coleman. The trainer is suitable for any option.

Specifics

The key feature of KB-trainer is that this keyboard trainer allows you to train and to get used to all keys on your keyboard, not letters and numbers only, but everything.

Basic principles

To get used to the location of the key, you need to press it many times.
It is better to type slowly but without mistakes.
You can increase the speed of the movement when your fingers are used to button locations.
When typing button combination it’s best to use both hands whenever possible. For example, if you type a capital letter you press the Shift with one hand and letter key with another.

How it works

The implementation of the simulator is based on the basic principles.

All symbols / keys are grouped into Keyboard packs. Each “Keyboard” containts a set of symbol or combinations. You can train every Keyboard separately.
There are also complex “Kayboard”, for example “English” pack contains all English letters, numbers and special keys, and punctuation.
The “Keyboard” workout consists of lessons. Each lesson adds a subset of symbols / keys. To study the lesson you make exercises. In the beginning they contain only the symbols / keys of this lesson (up to a certain level). Then all symbols from the lessons already passed are mixed in.
The algorithm generates a random training text based on training history. Symbols you made a mistake on are offered more frequently than others. The algorithm tries to add characters/keys to the text so that you type them all equally well.
When all symbols and keys are learned, you start the last lesson of the Keyboard pack. These exercises there contain all symbols and combinations.
When all the lessons are completed, you will be “stuck” in the last lesson with texts consisting of all the keyboard characters until you type each character a specified number of times. For each error, the number set in the settings will be subtracted from the already dialed amount. The more mistakes you make, the more the erroneous character / key will come across in the generated texts. At the same time the trainer will switch to the typing speed training mode. Algorithm will increase the metronome tempo during exercises when you pass them without errors, and decrease the tempo otherwise.

Good luck!

If you’d like to discuss a feature request, open an issue on GitHub and follow the guide. If you found a bug, open an issue on GitHub and follow the guide. The more detail the better! If you want to contribute, submit a pull request!

P.S. Plans

There are a lot of ideas here. I want to make some possibility to train shortcuts. Not only usual when some modifiers pressed with some letter key, but some like in Vim or Emacs, with some shortcuts sequence. Add possibility to users to create their own custom keyboards. I afraid that there will be some issues with European languages diacritics. And I have no idea if this trailer could be useful for eastern languages like China or Japanese.

Also I noticed that it’s more fun to train not just with metronome tics, but with some background music. For example disco gives rather smooth rhythm of 100-130 bits per minute. And I have and idea to make some disco-mix with smooth rhythm change instead of simple metronome. Probably some synth music will work also.