Legatino Review: Free Touch Typing Tutor That Fixes Accuracy First

Why bother learning touch typing in 2026?

Most of us learned to type by accident, with two or four fingers and quick glances at the keys. It works, but it’s slow, it breaks your concentration, and looking down every few seconds strains your neck over a long workday. Touch typing fixes all three. Your fingers learn where the keys are, and your eyes stay on the screen.

Plenty of free typing sites exist already. Many lean on races, leaderboards and flashy animations, so you end up chasing words per minute rather than building a clean habit. Legatino takes the opposite approach. It’s quiet, minimal and strict about accuracy, and it’s completely free.

What is Legatino?

Legatino is an open-source touch typing tutor that runs in your browser. It was designed and built by Éric Maeker, a French geriatrician who has practised since 2003. He also wrote FreeMedForms, a free medical records program. That background shows. The app is built around a clean, low-stimulation interface and short sessions, and it includes optional medical vocabulary for people who type clinical notes all day.

It’s released under the MIT licence, shows no ads, and needs no account. You can also install it as a desktop-style app from your browser’s address bar, and it works offline after that. At the time of writing, the app shows version 5.6.9 (6 November 2026). The interface is available in English, French, German and Spanish.

Who is it for?

• Two-finger typists who want to stop looking down for good. The Prelude coach has no speed targets, so you can take your time.
• Writers, students and bloggers who want their typing to keep up with their thinking.
• Doctors, nurses and care staff who type the same clinical terms and abbreviations every shift.
• Older learners and people returning to work, who may find busy, game-style typing sites overwhelming.
• Fast typists who want to clean up bad habits. The Virtuoso coach adds speed targets and harder material.

How Legatino teaches you: accuracy first, speed later

Legatino is built around one rule. Speed doesn’t count until you’re accurate. The site says it plainly: below 95% accuracy, a speed figure only measures how quickly you make mistakes. With strict mode on (the recommended setting), the cursor won’t move until you press the right key. The idea is to correct each mistake on the spot, so your fingers learn the right movement rather than the wrong one.

Exercises aren’t drawn from a fixed list. Legatino records every keystroke and scores each key on accuracy and reaction delay, then uses those scores to decide what you practise next. A key counts as “learned” only once you type it reliably. Learned keys then come back at growing intervals, a few minutes later, the next day, then less often, using the same spaced repetition idea as flashcard apps. One bad session also won’t wipe out a key you’ve learned. Only a lasting decline sends it back for more practice.

The 35-stage course

The course runs in this order: finding the keys, letter pairs, words (in three stages of increasing difficulty), capitals and Shift, punctuation, accents, the top row, the AltGr layer, numbers, and finally real text and endurance. In Guided mode, each stage opens once you meet the criteria for the one before. In On demand mode, every stage is open from the start.

On a standard QWERTY keyboard, as used in India, the UK and the US, you start with your index fingers resting on the raised bumps of the F and J keys. Early drills have no timer at all.

Short sessions and built-in finger rests

Sessions are short, about 15 to 30 minutes, and start with a warm-up. The coach suggests what to work on, but you choose. There are two firm rules. First, Legatino makes you take a finger rest after a set amount of stretching (long reaches, top-row work and little-finger keys). Second, it ends the session if three exercises in a row fall below 90% accuracy, because by then you’re practising mistakes. If you like enforced breaks, they pair well with a desktop break timer such as Stretchly.

The app also reminds you to keep your wrists off the desk while you type. When your wrist rests on the desk, your hand pivots instead of moving, so your fingers have to stretch further. The site also warns that leaning on your wrist while typing compresses the carpal tunnel. Note that Legatino only reminds you. It can’t detect your posture.

What makes Legatino different from other typing sites

1. It works out why you made each mistake

Most tutors just tell you that you got 6% wrong. Legatino sorts every error into one of seven families: neighbouring key, early keystroke, word boundary, repeated previous letter, forgotten accent, upper/lower case, and mirror key (the same finger position on the other hand). Anything else goes into an eighth “other” category. It only tells you which family dominates when one clearly does, and never on a handful of errors.

This matters because the fixes are different. If your fingers run ahead of the text, the cure is to slow down on letter sequences, not to drill one “weak” key. According to the developer, the most common error family across about 200 real exercises is the space typed before the last letter of a word. Your thumb hits the spacebar too soon and the word breaks. Legatino now has a dedicated “Space too early” exercise for it.

2. Try Colemak, Dvorak or bépo without changing Windows

Legatino supports seven layouts: QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ, Spanish, bépo, Colemak and Dvorak, with Mac variants of AZERTY, QWERTZ and Spanish. The app reads your keystrokes and translates them to the chosen layout itself. That means you can practise Colemak or Dvorak on a normal QWERTY laptop without changing your system keyboard settings. Each layout keeps its own separate progress.

3. Vocabulary for professionals

Instead of random sentences, you can install a professional vocabulary. In English, that’s Care: common vocabulary, a pack of 953 everyday care words and 46 abbreviations, using UK clinical shorthand such as NBM, DNACPR and NEWS2. It then feeds the typing test with words from your field, and a separate workshop drills the abbreviations. Once installed, it works offline. Specialty packs (cardiology, surgery, geriatrics, psychiatry, emergency medicine, intensive care and drug names) are listed as in preparation, and only in French so far.

4. Useful extras that stay out of the way

How fast will you get?

Legatino gives two measured reference points rather than promises. One real performance card showed 21 words per minute after 8 hours of practice and 294 exercises, the point where you no longer hunt for keys. For 65 WPM, the developer estimates 20 to 40 hours. These are the developer’s own figures, not independent tests, and your results will depend mostly on how regularly you practise. The site’s milestones are a useful guide:

How to get started with Legatino

Pros and cons

Frequently asked questions