Many years ago, Felipe Castro learned to type with the help of the proprietary Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing application. But though Castro is from Brazil, he had to use an English keyboard layout. That got him thinking. When Castro, an engineer by trade, decided to improve his programming skills, he decided to create a touch typing tutor, Klavaro, and make it keyboard- and language-independent.
Klavaro is designed to help people learn the keys on a keyboard by touch – that is, by muscle memory. Castro says it can help you learn a new keyboard layout in a week or two, if you use it for one hour a day. “For example, I switched from QWERTY to Dvorak using it, then I switched again to the Portuguese-specific layout Nativo.”
The software provides easy lessons for beginners, and supports any keyboard layout. The lessons in the basic module go through the keyboard row by row, using pairs of keys, balancing the use of fingers of both hands.
Castro says, “I like the simplicity and elegance of pure C, so I didn’t have to think much when I chose that to write Klavaro.” The application also relies on the GTK+ toolkit.
Castro gets a lot of enhancement requests for the application. “When people ask for some incredible new feature, I analyze it carefully, so that it doesn’t ruin the tutor’s methodology. There are some features I think would be nice, like network support for local ranking. Another thing I thought would be great was some kind of dictation lesson, though that would be very language-specific. But I don’t have much time to deal with all those things. It would be nice if someone else got interested in developing further some of those features. SourceForge.net provides a nice infrastructure for people to collaborate, and I’m very open to new contributors.”