Show HN: LiveTyper, a simple typing speed tester | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: LiveTyper, a simple typing speed tester

livetyper.com

Phoenix/LiveView using Presence to show the other players online.

My 2nd thing in a vague quest to make 12 things in 12 months.

Just a little feedback: the typing does not keep up with me (and I only type around 80wpm), and lags so far behind that I can get around 15-20 characters in before it registers that a mistake was made 15 characters ago.

I'm running it on Firefox, on Windows 10.

Based on other responses, I'm assuming this doesn't happen for everyone, so if it's just me, feel free to ignore. Just putting it out there in case you'd like to investigate.

15 characters ago feels excessive, I get maybe 1-2 at 120-140wpm. Do you know what your ping to the US east coast is?

Yeah, it definitely feels sluggish, so I assumed it was bugging out. It started pretty snappy and then slowed way down.

Ping tester says somewhere between 50 and 75ms to Amazon's Virginia center.

I think it ran out of memory and the BEAM crashed and restarted. Gave it a bit more memory, hoping it'll hold out haha

Ha ha! Nice.

Yeah, I saw on another comment that you're apparently running this with SSR, which is pretty crazy, to me! I'm surprised it's as snappy as it is, honestly, but the lag makes a lot of sense, now.

Also shocked that you'd want to incur that much bandwidth cost - assuming you're being charged for it. Something like this should be able to run in the client effortlessly, so I would think even experimenting with SSR, you'd want to do most of the processing client side and then just dribble in the server re-renders, for more batched processing.

In any case, good job! Definitely does the thing you set out to do with it, and is a clear demonstration of SSRs capabilities (and current weaknesses).

I'm in NY and this was happening for me. I'd be 10-15 characters down and get a stream of red. One thing that was sort of annoying is that because it's using a custom text box (or something) when I control-w to kill the previous word for an error, nothing happens. I tried option-delete as well but no luck.

You can do ctrl-backspace or meta-backspace. I tried ctrl-w but that actually closes the window in Firefox :D

Same, I just clocked 199 wpm and at times I actually had to wait for the screen to catch up before I could continue typing (Firefox on macOS)

Holey moley, 199?! Did you run out of text?

shrug it's what it showed me when I finished. I think it overestimated my speed near the end as it seemed to respond slower as I got further along in the text. Cool demo tho! I should show it to my kids, they'll have a kick out of it.

I confirm this comment: the UI is way too slow for what it is trying to measure. I also type about 80 WPM and found the response speed of this site unbearable.

Also using Firefox on Windows 10.

Yep, extremely laggy, makes it impossible to type correctly at a decent speed (100+)

Nice. I clocked 80 WPM and as others pointed out, it sometimes lags behind your keystrokes. I also love playing with https://typeracer.com at times. I don't understand how some of you can clock 120+ WPM. I have been typing for years but just can't get my WPM beyond 80-85 at best.

For what it's worth, I "naturally" got up to 110-140wpm (depending on a lot of factors) but can't seem to break into 150, ever. I see people easily go 170-180, but I seem to just hit a wall and make tons of mistakes. Maybe a genetic thing, who knows :D Or maybe those people just train a TON.

OK, yet another typing speed tester!

My 2 cents:

- I like the "heatmap" and the ghosts features.

- I don't like the fact that the text moves around on the screen while i am typing. It really shouldn't do that, because it is distracting.

- Once you have a typo, the program never notices that the entered text is just off-by-one. Could use improvement.

- I don't like it being server side. It seems so unnecessary. But hey, it's your page!

Thanks for the feedback! Was that you I was just racing? :)

Not sure, i got slightly over 100wpm

Pretty cool, but there's a lot of lag when typing fast. I keep typing from memory, but I don't see typos in real time. Got up to 150 WPM and the text didn't scroll fast enough to see what to type next. I'm guessing the lag comes from the networking part, is there any chance you could provide a single-player version, or fix the lag on the multiplayer one?

I've been checking the server logs, and it claims to always reply within a few milliseconds. It might just be lag somewhere between the server and the users' browsers. Seems to be mostly ok for me and then suddenly go super creep mode for a few seconds.

Due to the nature of LiveView, I don't think I can eliminate the lag entirely, sorry. It's not just the other players, your own stuff goes to the server and back every keystroke too.

I can just press <space> and it counts my keypresses. It doesn't look like it's actually validating I'm typing the correct thing.

Edit: hold on, that was me being dumb. The actual bug is that if I press "Caps lock" (because I type capitalized letters by quickly typing Caps lock + Letter + Caps lock) it incorrectly counts it as a keypress.

Maybe the UI could be clearer; if the text has a red background, that means it's wrong and you need to backspace. Correct text will have a blue background.

Sorry about the caps lock, will add! Currently only checking for the shift key itself. Good catch, thank you.

Ok, caps should work now! Please let me know if you're still having issues.

That worked perfectly, thanks :). That's a really nice app

I'm not sure if it's the site problem, but seems like I can just smash keyboard and it registers it as correct?

Edit: rather server overload - everything was for a while counted for me as a typo (without a typo counter); now I see red meant all the time incorrect.

Are you sure it's registering as correct? If you hit the wrong keys it should highlight them with red background and show "Typos" in the top right corner.

Schrodinger typing - it was both registered as typo and not counted as one.

Weird! Can you reproduce it? If so, could you let me know how?

Looks like the counting just not starting if you make a typo on the very first letter.

When I typo the very first letter, the typo count goes up, but the game doesn't begin counting. I have to backspace and get the first letter right, then it starts. Is that not what you're seeing?

Yes, that's what I see

That's correct then :) I suppose I could prevent typos before the game even started, hm.

That's fun. 122wpm, but it feels like the text was trying to keep up, and it kept throwing me off a little bit. I can average ~140 on text like these, normally.

Haha I'm in the same boat. I think it's the slight lag because this is server-side rendered with LiveView. I'm just trying to keep going when the occasional little hiccup occurs and I'm confident I didn't mistype. Takes getting used to, though, for sure.

That's pleasant. At one point it was approximately one half-screen away in lag (at 125 wpm or so). But this gave an additional impression of zooming.

Typing backspace in Vivaldi causes it to revert to the previous webpage, but Chrome has no problem in that regard. Cool site :)

Thanks! Sorry about the Vivaldi experience :(

It just completely locks up for me right now, might have to try later. Front page of HN and whatnot.

Ditto. It keeps trying to make a WebSocket connection, failing, and then retrying forever. Looks like there's no error handling.

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