GNU Typist

Introduction to GNU Typist

GNU Typist (also called gtypist) is a universal typing tutor. You can learn correct typing and improve your skills by practising its exercises on a regular basis. Its main features are:

Project goals

The aim of this Free Software project is to provide valuable help to individuals and schools all over the world in learning or teaching how to type.

Free Software can be a valuable resource in education. Not only can it be technically or pedagogically superior to proprietary counterparts, but it can also promote the values of the GNU project in the schools:

See the Education section for more details about Free Software for Education.

As project maintainers, our main goal is to protect users' freedom and encourage their cooperation, by:

To see a full list of the current plans we have to improve GNU Typist, you can read the latest TODO file, available here. In a nutshell, our major long-term plans include:

Downloading GNU Typist

The latest stable release of GNU Typist is version 2.9.5, released in August 2014.

GNU Typist can be found on http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gtypist/ (via HTTP) and ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gtypist/ (via FTP). It can also be found on one of our FTP mirrors; please use a mirror if possible.

For Windows users, pre-compiled binaries are available. These currently may have a problem with multi-byte input which will be addressed in the next release. The binaries are available in .7z format and can be found in the w32_binaries folder.

Documentation

GNU Typist documentation can be found at http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/doc/. You may also find more information about GNU Typist by running “info gtypist”, “man gtypist”, or looking in the documentation directory for gtypist on your system (which might be /usr/share/doc/gtypist/ or something similar).

Mailing Lists

The discussion list for GNU Typist is <bug-gtypist@gnu.org>, and is used to discuss all aspects of GNU Typist, including support questions, bug reports, suggestions, patches, and new lessons.

Announcements about GNU Typist and most other GNU software are made on <info-gnu@gnu.org>.

To subscribe to these or any GNU mailing lists, please send an empty mail with a Subject: header line of just "subscribe" to the relevant -request list. For example, to subscribe yourself to GNU announcement list, you would send mail to <info-gnu-request@gnu.org> with no body and a Subject: header line of just "subscribe". Or you can use the mailing list web interface.

Request an Enhancement

If you would like any new feature to be included in future versions of GNU Typist, please send a request to <bug-gtypist@gnu.org>.

Please remember that development of GNU Typist is a volunteer effort, and you can also contribute to its development. For information about contributing to the GNU Project, please read How to help GNU.

Report a Bug

If you think you have found a bug in GNU Typist, then please send as complete a report as possible to <bug-gtypist@gnu.org>.

Helping GNU Typist

You can contribute to GNU Typist by sending bug reports, suggestions, patches and new lessons to <bug-gtypist@gnu.org>.

You can also directly access the development versions of documentation and source files in our Git repository. In particular, here are direct links to the latest versions of our TODO and QUESTIONS (answers to Brave GNU World questions) files

You may also subscribe to the bug-gtypist@gnu.org mailing list.

How to contribute new lessons

You can contribute a new tutorial in 2 ways:

  1. Simply type the tutorial, containing instructions and exercises, in a plain text file (or in another open and standard format, such as HTML). You may reuse some instructions available in existing tutorials, in the lessons/ directory in the GNU Typist sources.
    Send it to <bug-gtypist@gnu.org>.
    Another contributor will take care of converting your tutorial to the GNU Typist format.
  2. You can also directly write your tutorial in the GNU Typist format. It is a simple scripting language which is described in the online manual.
    Once your lesson file is complete, you can test it by simply typing (if you named it new.typ):
    gtypist new.typ
    You can then send it to us as described above.

Instructions for writing interface messages in new languages will be available soon.

Other free typing tutors

There are other free typing tutors, most of them released under the GNU General Public License. They're worth trying too!

Maintainer

GNU Typist is currently being maintained by Mihai Gătejescu.