Warm Up — Typing Test
Practice and improve your typing speed without leaving your editor. Plain words,
a race against the clock, or real code — with live WPM, a results breakdown and
personal bests, in a panel that picks up your VS Code theme.
Install
Search for Warm Up in the Extensions view, or grab it from the
VS Marketplace.
Getting started
Open the panel by clicking Warm Up in the status bar, pressing
ctrl+alt+p (cmd+alt+p on
macOS), or running Warm Up: Start typing test from the command palette.
Then just type. The test starts on your first keystroke.
| Key |
Does |
| esc |
New test |
| shift+esc |
Retry the same text |
| backspace |
Fix the current word |
| ctrl/alt+backspace |
Delete the whole word |
| enter |
New line, in code mode |
| tab |
Skip indentation, in code mode |
The restart key is configurable — set warmUp.quickRestart to tab if you prefer
monkeytype's binding.
Modes
- words — a fixed number of words (10 / 25 / 50 / 100), in one of 14 languages.
- time — type as much as you can before the clock runs out (15 / 30 / 60 / 120s).
- quotes — a passage from a public-domain source, short to long.
- code — a real snippet in one of 12 programming languages, syntax highlighted.
Indentation is skipped for you; newlines are typed with enter.
- zen — no target and no mistakes; type until you feel warmed up, then
shift+enter to see how you did.
Turn on punctuation and numbers to make words mode harder.
Code, in a real editor
Warm Up: Type code in the editor
(ctrl/cmd+alt+e) opens the snippet in
a read-only editor tab instead of the panel: your theme, your font, your
syntax highlighting, and the editor's own cursor as the caret. The text starts
dimmed and lights up as you type it correctly.
Practising a selection or a file goes to the editor too, unless you turn
warmUp.codeInEditor off. Code mode inside the panel is unaffected.
While a run is going, esc restarts and shift+esc
stops. If another extension already owns the editor's typing — a modal-editing
extension such as Vim — Warm Up notices and falls back to the panel.
Practice with your own code
Select anything in the editor and press
ctrl+alt+s (cmd+alt+s),
or use Warm Up: Practice with the selected code from the context menu.
Warm Up: Practice with the current file does the same for the whole file.
These runs are not saved to your history, so they cannot skew your personal bests.
Results
Every finished test reports WPM, accuracy, raw WPM, consistency, a
character breakdown (correct / wrong / extra / missed) and a speed-over-time chart.
- WPM counts correct characters only, five characters to a word.
- CPM replaces it for Chinese and Korean, where "words" are 1–2 characters
and words-per-minute would under-report a fluent typist by about a third.
- Raw counts every character you typed.
- Accuracy is the share of keystrokes that were correct.
- Consistency is how even your pace was, second to second.
Results are stored locally in VS Code's global state. Your best run per
configuration shows up in the status bar and under Warm Up: Show personal bests;
Warm Up: Clear results history wipes them.
Settings
Everything is reachable from the panel toolbar, from Warm Up: Change a setting,
or from the settings editor.
| Setting |
Description |
Default |
warmUp.mode |
words, time, quotes, code or zen |
words |
warmUp.count |
Words, or seconds on the clock |
25 |
warmUp.quoteLength |
short, medium, long or any |
medium |
warmUp.codeInEditor |
Practise code in a real editor tab |
true |
warmUp.language |
Natural language for words and time modes |
english |
warmUp.programmingLanguage |
Language used for code snippets |
javascript |
warmUp.punctuation |
Sprinkle punctuation into the words |
false |
warmUp.numbers |
Sprinkle numbers into the words |
false |
warmUp.stopOnError |
off, letter or word — block until a mistake is fixed |
off |
warmUp.sound |
Keypress sound: off, click, typewriter, beep |
off |
warmUp.errorSound |
Distinct sound on a mistake |
true |
warmUp.volume |
Sound volume, 0 to 1 |
0.4 |
warmUp.caretStyle |
line, block, underline or off |
line |
warmUp.smoothCaret |
Animate the caret between characters |
true |
warmUp.liveStats |
Show WPM and accuracy while typing |
true |
warmUp.fontSize |
Size of the text you type, in pixels |
26 |
warmUp.colorBlindMode |
Move errors off red |
false |
warmUp.quickRestart |
esc, tab or off |
esc |
Settings from version 1 are migrated automatically the first time you run 2.0.
Accessibility
- Mistakes are marked by shape (underline, strike-through) as well as colour, and
warmUp.colorBlindMode moves errors off red entirely.
- The character you actually pressed is shown above the one you missed.
- The caret can be disabled, and animations respect
prefers-reduced-motion.
- Everything is driven from a real focused input, so dead keys (the French
`), AltGr combinations and IME composition all work.
Website
The landing page lives in website/ and deploys to Vercel. It imports
the extension's real typing engine from core/, so the page is the product:
the headline is a typing test, and the playground below it runs words, the clock,
quotes and code with a live keyboard heatmap.
pnpm dev:website # local
pnpm build:website # → website/dist
Vercel needs no configuration beyond the repository: vercel.json at the root
sets the build command and output directory.
Contributing
Word lists, quotes and code snippets are plain JSON files — adding a language is
a small pull request. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the layout and
the dev workflow, including a browser preview that runs the panel without an
extension host.
Credits
- monkeytype for setting the bar on what a typing test
should feel like.
- Typings, the original project this
extension grew out of.
- Flaticon, for the SVGs used to build the extension icon.
License
GPL-3.0-or-later
