When comparing GNU Typist vs RapidTyping, the Slant community recommends RapidTyping for most people. In the question“What are the best free typing tutors?” RapidTyping is ranked 1st while GNU Typist is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose RapidTyping is:
It's free for personal or corporate use with no registration or usage limitations as well as no toolbars or adware.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free Libre Open Source Software
The official touch typing software from the GNU Project.
Pro Choose between a variety of tutorials
GNU Typist includes Czech, English, Russian and Spanish. They have simple exercises also for German, French and Norwegian.
Pro Free
It's free for personal or corporate use with no registration or usage limitations as well as no toolbars or adware.
Pro Supports famous keyboard layouts
Pro Progress tracking
Pro Program languages
RapidTyping interface is enabled for the following languages:
- Abkhazian
- Arabic
- Bosnian
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Chinese (Traditional)
- Dutch
- English
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Greek
- Hungarian
- Indonesian
- Kurdish
- Polish
- Portuguese (Brasil)
- Russian
- Serbian
- Slovenian
- Spanish
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
Pro work
Pro Lesson editor
Pro Offline use
No Internet-access needed to run the program.
Pro Portable
Pro Full courses for all levels
Pro Simple XML storage for lessons
Pro Simple interface
Pro Illustrated hand movement
Pro Virtual keyboard
Pro Arabic support
It supports the Arabic keyboard layout.
Pro Customizable plans
Pro Dvorak keyboard layout support
Pro Classrooms are supported
Cons
Con Colour coding could be improved upon
It would be nice if the prompts were in the same colour as the key they want you to hit on the keyboard so you can easily see which fingers to use.
Con Proprietary software
Even though this is a freeware, it's still a proprietary software.
Con No native Linux version
Though it can be run on Linux with some effort.
Con No native macOS version
Though it can be run on macOS with some effort: http://www.rapidtyping.com/downloads.html
Con Lessons are repetitive
Lessons are repetitive and a bit boring, but you can add your own if you want to.