Make Pulse yours.

Why one menu bar holds a hundred readings

The same typing data tells different stories depending on how you frame it. The settings here decide which story sits in your menu bar all day — and, more quietly, which numbers you start to trust.

Your speed metric is the first fork. WPM treats five characters as a word, so it stays comparable to the rest of the world and to the leaderboard. CPM counts characters and rewards dense, punctuated writing. KPM counts every physical keypress, which is the honest number if your day is half shortcuts and modifier chords. None of them is more correct — they answer different questions, and you pick the question.

The period you average over changes the mood of the number. A one-hour window twitches with your current burst and reads like a live speedometer; a 30-day average barely moves and reads like a baseline. The session thresholds work the same way underneath — they decide when a pause becomes a break, which is what separates time-spent-typing from time-spent-staring and keeps your long-term stats from being diluted by idle minutes.

The synthetic-keystroke filter is the unglamorous setting that makes the rest honest. Paste a paragraph, fire a text-expander snippet, or let an AI write a function, and a naive counter would credit you with 300 WPM you never typed. Pulse drops that input by default so your numbers reflect your hands. If a niche tool of yours trips it, loosen the filter — and when you go to compare, filters let you carve the data down to the app, device or stretch of time you actually mean.