Terminal Velocity

A retro, green-screen touch-typing trainer for English, Ukrainian and Russian.

Terminal Velocity teaches touch typing one letter at a time. You start with the six most common letters of a language. Each new letter unlocks only once you can type every letter you already have quickly and accurately. The text is made of real words wherever possible. The page tracks your weakest keys, so your practice goes where it's needed most.

It's a single web page with no account, no server and no tracking. It works offline, and it can be installed as an app.

Features

• Progressive mode. Letters unlock in order of how often they're used in the chosen language. A letter counts as mastered when its most recent 30 presses are at least 95% accurate and at or under your target speed. Once every unlocked letter is mastered, the next one unlocks. The target speed is yours to set, in words per minute, and each language keeps its own.
• Practice aimed at weak letters. Words containing your newest letter, or letters not yet at target, come up more often.
• Real words first. The texts use about 17,000 common words per language, 2–7 letters long, filtered to remove names, places, abbreviations and offensive words.
• Made-up words that follow the spelling rules. When your letters can't make enough real words, made-up words fill the gap. They follow each language's spelling rules: no tripled letters, only the double letters the language really uses, Russian жи-ши and ча-ща, Ukrainian ь only after д т з с ц л н, and so on.
• Custom letters. Practise any four letters you choose, to isolate particular keys.
• Random word (Ukrainian). Choose Random word under Mode to type one common Ukrainian word nine times. When you finish, its English meaning appears, with the stress mark shown, for example буди́нок — house, building (noun). It stays on screen until you press Tab for the next word. The 3,000 words come up in random order with no repeats. These tests count towards your Ukrainian statistics and level, but not towards best speed or the letter ladder.
• Punctuation. Tick Punctuation to turn the text into short sentences, in any mode and any language. Each sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with . ? or !, with commas, the odd ; : or dash, and now and then words in "quotes" or (brackets). English also gets possessives like cat's. Capitals and punctuation count towards your speed and accuracy, but not towards the letter statistics or the letter ladder. On the on-screen keyboard, the key and the Shift key for the other hand light up together.
• Letter drills. For letter sets that make few words, or whenever you tick Drills, you get drills that use every letter equally and practise every pair of letters evenly.
• Weakest keys. The page shows your four slowest keys and your four least accurate keys, based on all your finished tests.
• Levels. You earn 1 point per second of typing and 20 points per finished test, and each level needs a little more than the last. Each language shows its own level, test count, time typed and best speed.
• On-screen keyboard for Ukrainian and Russian. It highlights the next key to press and dims letters you haven't unlocked yet.
• Physical keyboard support. With Keyboard set to QWERTY (English) or ЙЦУКЕН (Ukrainian and Russian), your keys are read as that layout, including ЙЦУКЕН punctuation, so you don't need to install another keyboard layout. System uses whatever your computer's own layout types instead.
• Export and import progress to a file, for backups or moving to another computer.
• Intro screen. The first time you open it each session, green digital rain falls, then fades back while a greeting types itself out. Press Enter to start typing, or Esc or Skip to go straight in. If your computer is set to reduce motion, the greeting appears straight away without the animation.
• A smooth gliding caret that fits the height of the letters, and blinks at the end of a test.

Languages

Language	Letters	Starting letters	Keyboard
English	26	e t a o i n	QWERTY
Ukrainian (Українська)	33, including ґ є і ї	о а н и і е	Ukrainian ЙЦУКЕН (ґ on the # key)
Russian (Русский)	33	о е а и н т	Russian ЙЦУКЕН

Each language keeps its own progress, statistics, level and best speed.

Keyboard shortcuts

Keys	Action
Enter	Leave the intro screen and start typing (Esc skips it)
Tab	New text with the same letters
Backspace	Fix a mistake
Ctrl + Backspace	Delete back to the start of the word
Alt + L	Next language (English → Ukrainian → Russian)

Using it

• In a browser: open index.html directly. Nothing to install, and it works offline.
• As an app: open the published site in Chrome or Edge, then choose Install. It runs in its own window with its own icon, works offline, and updates itself when a new version is published.

Privacy and security

• No data leaves your computer. Your progress is saved only in your own browser's storage. There's no account, analytics or advertising, and the page makes no outside connections.
• The font is built in, so the page doesn't contact any font service.
• Strict content security policy. Only the page's own scripts and styles can run (each is pinned by a fingerprint), nothing can be loaded from elsewhere, and the page can't send data anywhere.
• Imported progress files are checked, and only well-formed values are accepted.
• Hidden from search engines (noindex), and no referrer information is sent.

Files

File	Purpose
index.html	The whole app: page, styles, code, word lists and vocabulary
manifest.webmanifest	App name, icon and colours, which make it installable
sw.js	Offline support
icons/	App icons
.nojekyll	Tells GitHub Pages to serve the files exactly as they are
screenshot.png	The picture above
THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md	Credits and licences for the word lists, vocabulary and font

Credits

• English word list: from SCOWL (Spell Checker Oriented Word Lists), © Kevin Atkinson and contributors, via the wordlist-english package.
• Ukrainian–English vocabulary (Random word): meanings from English Wiktionary, extracted by Wiktextract and published by kaikki.org, under CC BY-SA 4.0. The adapted vocabulary is shared under the same licence.
• Ukrainian and Russian word lists: derived from wordfreq frequency data by Robyn Speer, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The adapted lists in this project are shared under the same licence.
• Word filtering: done with pymorphy3 and its Russian and Ukrainian dictionaries. They were used to build the lists and are not included here.
• Font: Source Code Pro © Adobe, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Full notices are in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.

Licence

The licence for Terminal Velocity's own code hasn't been chosen yet. The bundled word lists and font keep their own licences, as described above.