Stop Typing Lorem Ipsum: Practice on Your Own Code with Gittype

You've been staring at the same five lines of code for the last hour, and your typing speed is not the bottleneck. But when you sit down to practice your typing, you're stuck with "the quick brown fox" or some random boilerplate that has nothing to do with what you actually write every day. Gittype is a typing practice tool that uses your own source code as the material—so you get faster at typing the syntax, keywords, and patterns you actually use.

Built in Rust, Gittype turns any Git repository into a typing challenge. Point it at your current project, a trending GitHub repo, or any codebase you want to practice with, and it serves up real functions and code blocks for you to type. It's a typing tutor for people who already know how to code.

What It Does

Gittype is a command-line typing practice application that pulls source code from Git repositories and presents it as typing exercises. It supports 20 programming languages out of the box, including Rust, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go, Ruby, Swift, Kotlin, Java, PHP, C#, C, C++, Haskell, Dart, Scala, Clojure, Elixir, Erlang, and Zig—with more on the way.

The tool tracks real-time metrics like words per minute, accuracy, and consistency as you type. It includes a ranking system that unlocks developer titles (from "Hello World Newbie" up to "Quantum Computer") with ASCII art, and offers multiple game modes: Normal, Time Attack, and custom difficulty levels ranging from Easy to Zen. You can pause and resume sessions without losing your stats, and there are over 15 built-in themes with support for custom themes.

You can run Gittype against your current directory, a specific local path, or any GitHub repository by URL. It also has a trending feature that lets you browse and practice with popular GitHub repositories, updated daily. And if you want to replay cached repositories, there's an interactive mode for that too.

Why It's Cool

The obvious selling point is that you're not typing random prose or imaginary function names. You're typing real code from real projects—your own messy spaghetti or someone else's well-structured library. This matters because typing speed in code is different from typing speed in prose. You need to handle special characters, indentation, camelCase, snake_case, and language-specific syntax. Gittype gets that.

The multi-language support is genuinely broad. Twenty languages is not a token effort—it covers most of what working developers actually use. And the fact that you can point it at a remote GitHub repo means you can practice with codebases you're curious about without cloning them manually first.

The ranking system is a nice touch. It's not just a scoreboard—it's a progression system that gives you something to work toward beyond raw WPM. The ASCII art titles add personality without being obnoxious. And the multiple game modes mean you can tailor the experience to how you want to practice. Time Attack for short bursts, Normal for longer sessions, Zen for when you just want to zone out and type.

Installation is refreshingly straightforward. There's a one-liner script, Homebrew, Cargo, Nix, and pre-compiled binaries for Intel Mac, Apple Silicon, Linux x64, Linux ARM64, and Windows. No hoops to jump through.

How to Try It

The quickest way to get started is to open a terminal and run the one-liner install:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/unhappychoice/gittype/main/install.sh | bash

If you're on macOS or Linux with Homebrew, it's even simpler:

brew install gittype

Or if you have Rust's Cargo installed:

cargo install gittype

Once installed, navigate to any project directory and run:

gittype

That will pull code from your current directory and start the typing challenge. You can also specify a path directly:

gittype /path/to/another/repo

Or clone and play with any GitHub repository:

gittype --repo clap-rs/clap

To browse trending repositories interactively:

gittype trending

And if you want to filter by language:

gittype trending rust

All the details are on the GitHub repository, including the full list of themes, game modes, and available binaries.

Final Thoughts

Gittype is a practical tool for a specific audience: developers who want to improve their typing speed and accuracy with the actual syntax they use daily. It's not trying to teach you to code, and it's not a toy. It fills a gap between generic typing practice and the real work of writing software. If you spend a lot of time at the keyboard and want to get more efficient, or if you just want to turn your own codebase into a typing game, this is worth the five minutes it takes to install.

Follow @githubprojects for more developer tools and open source projects.