ReType

A realistic human-typing simulator.

You drop in some text, pick a typist, and hit Start. After a short countdown, ReType types the text out wherever your cursor is focused — modelling the way a real person types: variable rhythm, word bursts, thinking pauses, fatigue, and mistakes that get noticed and corrected.

It's handy for repetitive text entry, demos, filling forms that don't accept paste, or anywhere you want typing that looks like a person did it instead of a clipboard dump.

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What makes the typing realistic (Ver 5.0)

The 5.0 engine is grounded in real keystroke-dynamics research (the Aalto 136M keystroke dataset, Gentner digraph timings, Ostry inter-key models):

• Per-keystroke physics — every letter-pair is timed by the fingers it uses: alternating hands (th, he) fly, same-finger pairs (ed, fg) drag. Speed genuinely varies key to key, not just word to word.
• People type in words — a familiar word fires as a quick burst, then a planning pause before the next; rare or long words cost more up front and hesitate mid-word.
• Speed that swings a lot — the working WPM random-walks inside the typist's range, with fast flurries and heavy-tailed "thinking" stalls.
• A stamina arc — energy decays as it types, so gaps widen, pauses lengthen, and mistakes creep up over a long passage (with a cold-start warm-up).
• Seven human error types — adjacent-key slips, transpositions (teh→the), doubled letters, dropped letters, case slips, delayed corrections (types a few more characters before noticing), and the original hand-picked fat-finger combos. Each is either corrected — or, in max-realism mode, left in.

Typists

Seven personas, each a different real person:

Typist	Feel
Hunt & Peck Hank	68, two index fingers, eyes on the keys (~18 wpm)
Two-Finger Tom	fast peck-typist who never learned home row (~36 wpm)
Thumbs Tiffany	phone texter, leaves readable typos (~45 wpm)
Graveyard Greg	exhausted night-shift, micro-sleeps mid-word (~48 wpm)
Cubicle Carol	steady home-row office touch typist (~64 wpm)
Caffeine Cody	machine-gun bursts then dead stops (~107 wpm)
Record-Holder Reyna	competition speed-typist, near-flawless (~140 wpm)

Extras

• Global hotkey + clipboard typing (6.0) — copy text anywhere, focus your target field, and press the hotkey (default Ctrl+Alt+T) to type your clipboard without alt-tabbing back to ReType. Press it again to stop. Switch the source between the text box and the clipboard.
• Live speed cardiogram — a heartbeat strip of instantaneous WPM so you can see the rhythm breathe.
• Demo mode — watch the whole performance (typos, corrections, pauses) play out inside the app, no second window needed.
• Pause / Resume / Stop instant mid-type, live progress bar, and the corner failsafe — slam your mouse into a screen corner to abort a real run.

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Install

Requires Python 3.8+.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run

python "Ver 6.0/ReType Ver 6.0.py"      # or:  python -m retype   (from Ver 6.0/)

1. Drop your text into the box.
2. Pick a Typist and an overall speed.
3. Click Demo to watch it type inside the app, or Start and click into the window you want the text typed into before the countdown ends.

To abort at any time click Stop, or (for a real run) move your mouse to a screen corner.

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Versions

The repo keeps the project's history:

Version	Notes
Ver 0.0	First prototype — single-line entry, blocking time.sleep, types all at once.
Ver 1.0	Multi-line text box, character-by-character typing, first pass at random pauses/typos.
Ver 2.0	Speed slider and error toggle added; timing logic still had a scheduling race.
Ver 3.0	Rewritten as a single event-driven app: working Stop button, countdown, gaussian timing, QWERTY-adjacent typos, corner failsafe, and no hardcoded paths.
Ver 4.0	Full realistic typing engine — WPM-based drifting speed, five human error patterns with delayed corrections, Pause/Resume/Stop, live progress bar.
Ver 5.0	Research-grounded rewrite into the retype package: per-keystroke digraph timing, word bursts, seven typist personas, a fatigue/stamina arc, seven error types, a live speed cardiogram, and an in-app Demo mode.
Ver 6.0	Current. Adds a global hotkey to start/stop a run from any window and a "type my clipboard" source — copy, focus the field, hit the hotkey.

Notes

• ReType drives your real keyboard via OS-level injection, so the active window genuinely receives the keystrokes — make sure the right window is focused before the countdown runs out.
• Proofreading typists (Baron) and real windows: the proofread pass steers the cursor with arrow keys, which assumes one arrow press moves one character and that nothing else disturbs the caret. That holds in plain text boxes and most forms. In editors that auto-indent, autocorrect, or auto-close brackets (IDEs, Google Docs, Word), the cursor can drift — use Demo mode (always exact) or a plain field for those, and don't click into the target window while a run is in progress.
• An optional ReType.ico placed next to the script (or in the repo root) is used as the window icon. It's entirely optional; the app runs fine without it.