The typing tutor teaches you the layout of the keyboard. It gives you a line of text to copy and guides you with a hint showing how to type the next letter.

As you learn each letter, the tutor will stop showing you hints for that letter. If you mis-type a letter, the hint for the correct letter will reappear in blue, and the location of the incorrect letter you actually pressed will appear in red.

The tutor also lets you practice chording whole words. It can present random words from the dictionary and give you a hint showing which switches make up each word's chord.

From the pipit-keyboard directory, enter:

$ cargo run -- -t

This will start the tutor using the default settings/settings.yaml file. To use a different file instead, specify it at the end:

$ cargo run -- -t settings/settings_evan.yaml

The tutor will open to a menu. You can use arrow keys to navigate between items in a menu or buttons in a dialog box, and enter to select one. You might be able to click on menu items and buttons as well, but this feature is not supported by all terminal emulators.

You can quit the tutor at any time by typing ctrl-c, or by selecting Quit in the main menu.

These options are available in the Options menu. All changes will be remembered next time you start the tutor.

By default, the tutor will assume your keyboard is in default_mode and use that layout to decide where to place the hints. If you want to practice a different mode, you can press enter to show a list of all the modes found in the settings file, and then select the mode you want to use.

This controls how quickly the tutor will stop showing you hints for letters you've learned. Use the left and right arrows to move the slider. Left is easier and right is more difficult. If the slider is all the way to the right, the tutor will only show you a hint once, the first time the letter appears.

If selected, always show hints for the letters that are being newly introduced in this lesson, regardless of the hint difficulty setting.

By default, the tutor won't let you continue after typing a wrong letter. The wrong letter won't appear on the screen, and the cursor won't move until you try again and type the correct letter. This is helpful when you're first learning the layout, but it can become frustrating when you're typing quickly or practicing chording whole words. Turning on the Allow Mistakes option means that incorrect letters will appear (in red) and you can continue typing past them. After a mistake, the tutor will use a yellow hint to show you where backspace is, in case you want to correct your mistake.

The tutor has no way of knowing which physical switches you're actually pressing on the keyboard. It only knows which letters the computer received. If you mash an unused combination of many switches that doesn't actually type anything, the tutor won't display any red hints. If you accidentally chord a whole word, it will only display a red hint for the last letter in that word.

Similarly, the tutor can't know the true layout of your keyboard, it can only assume the layout matches the settings file you gave it. If you update the settings file without re-loading the new keyboard firmware, or you switch the keyboard's mode without switching to the same mode in the tutor's options menu, then the hints will be incorrect.