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ngrrram

ngrrram is a CLI tool to practice typing ngrams (n adjacent symbols in particular order) to improve your typing speed and/or learn new keyboard layouts effectively.

a showcase of the ngrrram ui

Certain letter combination occur a lot more often than others, thus practicing these in particular makes sense. This type of practice is often recommended for example by Ben Vallack and Josh Kaufman, who learned Colemak in just 20 hours making strong use of ngrams.

There already exists a good tool for this type of practice called ngram-type. This tool is heavily inspired by ngram-type and I want to thank Ranel Padon for creating it.

However, ngram-type does not support emulating different keyboard layouts, which I found important so I would not have to switch my whole system to a layout I was still learning.

Also, some people might prefer local/offline CLI based solutions over web based ones.

Installation

Releases

Precompiled releases for linux, windows and macos are available.

AUR (maintained by JinEnMok)

Use yay or any other AUR helper to install for an Archlinux system:

yay -S ngrrram-git
or
yay -S ngrrram-bin

From Source

Make sure you have the rust tooling installed, then simply run:

cargo build --release

The executable will then be located at ./target/release/ngrrram

Looking for help packaging!

For now ngrrram is not available in any package repo. If you'd like to help by packaging for your platform, I'd gladly accept!

Usage

ngrrram is not very complex. It offers a few customization options as command flags, but starts with the recommended defaults if unconfigured.

Options:

Usage: ngrrram [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -n, --n <2|3|4|w|file>  use bi-(2), tri-(3), tetragrams(4), (w)ords or comma separated wordlist file. [default: 2]
  -t, --top <1-200>       use the top X ngrams ordered by usage. [default: 50]
  -c, --combi <1-200>     how many different ngrams to use in a single lesson. [default: 2]
  -r, --rep <number>      how often to repeat *each* different ngram in a lesson. [default: 3]
  -w, --wpm <number>      the wpm threshold at which the lesson is considered a success. [default: 40]
  -a, --acc <0-100>       the accuracy in percent at which the lesson is considered a success. [default: 94]
      --emu-in <layout>   your current keyboard layout. only needed if you want to emulate a different layout. see docs for supported layouts. [default: ]
      --emu-out <layout>  the layout you want to emulate. only needed if you want to emulate a different layout. see docs for supported layouts. [default: ]
      --show-ortho        show keyboard in ortholinear format
      --nokb              pass this flag to disable the keyboard layout display.
      --cat               the most important flag. don't practice alone.
  -h, --help              Print help

If you start ngrrram without parameters, it uses these recommended defaults:

ngrrram --n 2 --top 50 --combi 2 --rep 3 --wpm 40 --acc 100

Layout Emulation

To emulate a different keyboard layout in ngrrram, you must pass the flags --emu-in and --emu-out, the first one describing your current layout, and the second one being the one you want to emulate.

Available layouts are:

  • qwerty (Qwerty)
  • qwertz (Qwertz)
  • azerty (Azerty)
  • dvorak (Dvorak)
  • colemak (Colemak)
  • colemakdh (ColemakDH)

Having to provide an input layout is sub-optimal. I'm not sure how to get layout independent scancodes in rust; Could not get device_query to work. If you know a solution, please tell me.

Random Notes

  • The WPM timer for each lesson only starts once you type the first letter of that lesson; no need to stress.
  • Every 5 non-space characters are considered a "word" for the WPM calculation. Otherwise WPM would unnaturally skyrocket with smaller ngrams.