Words Per Minute!

A modern, fullscreen speed-reading trainer that displays text word by word at customizable speeds.

Features

• 🚀 Customizable Speed: Set your reading pace in Words Per Second (WPS) or Words Per Minute (WPM)
• 🎨 Fullscreen Display: Distraction-free reading experience
• ⌨️ Keyboard Controls:
  • Escape - Close the application
  • F1 - Exit fullscreen mode
  • F11 - Toggle fullscreen/windowed mode
  • Space - Pause/Resume reading
  • R - Reset to beginning
• 📝 Custom Text: Use your own paragraphs for training
• 🎯 Clean, Modern Codebase: Built with Python 3.12+ using modern best practices

Quick Start

Installation

# Using uv (recommended)
uv pip install -e .

# Or using pip
pip install -e .

Usage

# Run the application
wpm

# Or
wpm-gui

First Run

1. The application will prompt you for:

   • Font size (default: 100)
   • Reading speed in Words Per Second (default: 2.0 WPS = 120 WPM)
   • Your paragraph text

2. Press Enter to start displaying words

3. Use keyboard shortcuts to control the display

Advanced Usage

Programmatic Usage

from WPM import WPMApp, AppConfig

# Use with custom configuration
config = AppConfig(
    font_size=120,
    words_per_second=2.5,  # 150 WPM
    background_color="Navy",
    text_color="Yellow"
)

app = WPMApp(config=config)
app.initialize()
app.run()

See example_usage.py for more examples.

What's New (Modernization)

This codebase has been completely modernized with:

• ✅ Type Safety: Full type hints throughout
• ✅ Modular Architecture: Clean separation of concerns (config, core, UI)
• ✅ Modern Python: Dataclasses, pathlib, proper error handling
• ✅ Enhanced Features: Pause/resume, reset, progress tracking
• ✅ Better UX: Input validation, helpful error messages
• ✅ Documentation: Comprehensive docstrings and type hints
• ✅ No External Dependencies: Uses only Python standard library (tkinter)

See MODERNIZATION.md for detailed information about the improvements.

Project Structure

src/WPM/
├── __init__.py          # Package interface
├── app.py               # Main application
├── WPM.py               # Legacy compatibility wrapper
├── config/
│   └── settings.py      # Configuration management
├── core/
│   └── reader.py        # Word reading logic
└── ui/
    └── window.py        # GUI components

Requirements

• Python 3.12 or higher
• tkinter (usually included with Python)

Demo

Check out how it works here

Download releases here

Development

Building

# Build distribution packages
uv build

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! The modernized codebase makes it easy to:

• Add new features
• Write tests
• Extend functionality
• Improve documentation

License

See LICENCE.txt for details.

Acknowledgments

Original concept and implementation with modern improvements.

References

• How to Create Full Screen Window in Tkinter
• Python Tkinter refresh canvas
• Python Canvas.create_text Examples
• How to get multiline input from user
• Python exit commands
• Tkinter - Inserting text into canvas windows
• Getting screen's height and width using Tkinter | Python
• Canvas Text update - Python3 Tkinter
• Add a text to canvas in Tkinter (Python)
• How to Update text in Tkinter Label/Canvas widget using for loop?