What it does

A terminal-based typing speed test built with Python’s curses library. A random sentence is loaded from a text file and displayed on screen. As the user types, each character turns green for correct and red for incorrect in real time. Words per minute is calculated and displayed live throughout the test. The user can play multiple rounds or exit with ESC at any time.

Setting Up This Project

What is requirements.txt?

A requirements.txt file is a list of external packages your code needs to run, written in a plain text file. Instead of installing each package one by one, anyone can install everything in one command.

Step 1 — Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/Grow-with-Open-Source/Python-Projects.git
cd Python-Projects/typing-speed-test

Step 2 — Create a virtual environment (recommended)

A virtual environment keeps this project’s packages separate from everything else on your computer.

# Create it
python -m venv venv

# Activate it — Windows
venv\Scripts\activate

# Activate it — Mac/Linux
source venv/bin/activate

Step 3 — Install the requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

This reads requirements.txt and installs everything listed inside it automatically.

Step 4 — Run the program

python typing_test.py

A note on this project

The curses library comes built into Python automatically on Mac and Linux. On Windows it does not, so requirements.txt only installs windows-curses if you are on Windows — that is what the ; platform_system == "Windows" condition means. Pip handles this automatically based on your operating system, so you do not need to do anything different.