60
seconds
Your best run comes back as a ghost: a faint caret moving exactly as you did. Beat it and your new run takes its place.
Pick a length and type your first run. That run becomes your ghost. From then on, every run at that length has company: a faint caret that moves through the words at exactly the pace you managed last time, speeding up where you sped up and hesitating where you hesitated.
A bar above the words shows the gap in characters, green when you are ahead and red when you are behind. Finish faster than the ghost and your run replaces it, so the target keeps moving as you improve.
A personal best is just a number. A ghost shows you where the number came from. You can feel the moment it pulls away, which is usually the first ten seconds, when nerves make most people either rush and stumble or start too cautiously.
It is also a kinder kind of competition. The ghost is not a stranger with years of practice. It is you, on a good day, so you already know the pace is possible.
Want a bigger field? Rally races you against pace bots and your ghost at once. For a plain benchmark, try the 1 minute typing test.
When you finish a ghost run, Presspace records how far through the text you were every tenth of a second. Next time, that recording plays back as a faint second caret, so you are racing the exact pace of your best attempt.
No. You get fresh words every time, and the ghost's position is measured in characters, so the race stays fair without letting you memorise the text.
Only when you beat it. If your new run has a higher net speed and you finish the full length, it becomes the new ghost. Each length (15, 30, 60 and 120 seconds) keeps its own.
In your browser, with the rest of your results. Nothing is uploaded, and clearing your data in Settings removes it.