I kept the tooltips in the app itself short on purpose so they don't get in the way — this page is where the actual explanations live, for whenever you want them.
Most typing tests just tell you "that letter was wrong." KeySleuth tries to guess why — based on which key you actually hit, how long you held it, and what came before and after it. It's a best guess, not a certainty, but it's usually a pretty good one.
The catch-all. Doesn't fit any of the more specific patterns below, so it's just... a mistake. Everyone gets a few of these and there's not much to learn from them individually — it's only worth worrying about if they're a big chunk of your total errors.
You typed an extra key that had no business being there. Not a wrong letter instead of the right one — an additional one, usually from a finger brushing a neighbouring key on its way somewhere else.
You hit the key your other hand should've pressed — the mirror-image position on the opposite side of the board. This one's mostly a split-keyboard thing, and it usually means your hands briefly lost track of which one was supposed to be doing what.
The classic fat-finger slip, but on the same hand — you hit a key one row, column, or diagonal away from the one you meant. If you're seeing a lot of these clustered around the same key, it's often a sign your hand has drifted slightly off home row.
This one's a bit different from the rest. Say you accidentally skip a letter early in a word — every letter after that is now one position "ahead" of where the test expects it, so it would look like you typed the whole rest of the word wrong, even though you didn't. This category tries to catch that and trace it back to the one real mistake that caused it, instead of blaming you for six.
Only relevant if you're using dual-function keys (a key that types a letter on a quick tap, but does something else — like switching to a symbol layer — if you hold it a beat too long). If you held it just slightly past your Tapping Term setting, the firmware read it as a hold instead of a tap. Usually a timing thing, not a "you don't know your own keyboard" thing.
The same key fired twice from what was really one press. On older or lower-quality switches this is sometimes the switch's fault, not yours — worth knowing if you're seeing a lot of these on one specific key, since that can mean the switch itself is starting to go.
Two letters you both knew, typed in the wrong order — "form" instead of "from." This isn't really an accuracy problem so much as a timing one: your fingers just landed a beat out of sync with each other.
Three separate settings get confused for each other constantly, so here's the actual difference:
This is only about where punctuation and symbol keys physically sit — the position of ", @, #, and the key next to Enter differ between US and UK keyboards. It has nothing to do with QWERTY vs. Colemak vs. anything else. If your symbols are coming out wrong but your letters are fine, this is almost always the setting to check.
This is about where the letters live. Only matters if you're on a non-split, generic keyboard — if you've imported a real Vial file for a split board, that file already brings its own letter positions with it, and this setting gets ignored.
This is the actual physical shape of your keyboard — how many keys, how they're arranged, which ones are on which hand. Importing a real Vial export is always going to give you more accurate error detection than picking a generic preset, because KeySleuth can see your board's actual key positions instead of guessing at them. If you don't have a Vial file handy, the presets are a reasonable stand-in, just not a perfect one.
Because it's the difference between KeySleuth guessing at your keyboard's layout and actually knowing it. A lot of the error categories above (Mirror Hand Swap, Spatial Drift especially) depend on knowing exactly which keys are physically next to each other on your specific board — a generic preset can approximate that, a real export doesn't have to guess.
If you're not signed in, your test history stays entirely on your device (in local storage) and never leaves it. If you sign in with Google, it syncs to the cloud so it follows you across devices — see the Privacy Policy for the full rundown of what's collected and why.
The classic view has been retired, so this shouldn't come up anymore — but if you're on an old bookmark, your test history is safe either way, since both versions always read from the same saved data.
Use the Feedback button in the app — genuinely, if something here is confusing or a number doesn't match what you'd expect, that's useful to know and I'd rather hear about it than have you just quietly not trust the tool.