Skip to the click pad
ClickCPS

Spacebar Click Test

Same scoring, different input. Hit the space key as fast as you can and the counter climbs — the run starts on your first press, holding the bar down counts as exactly one press, and the page will not scroll while you do it. On a phone, tap the pad instead.

Length
0.0s elapsed10.0s left
CPS
0.00
presses
0
CPM
0
Band
—

Auto-repeat is not clicking, and this test knows the difference

Hold any key down and your operating system starts generating a stream of repeat events at a rate set in your OS keyboard settings. To a naive counter those look exactly like presses, which is why a badly written spacebar test can be beaten by leaning something on the key. Every one of those generated events arrives with a flag marking it as a repeat, and this test discards them. The bar has to physically come back up before the next press can register.

The consequence is that your score reflects the mechanical cycle of the key: press, release, press. On a spacebar that cycle is genuinely slower than on a mouse button — the key travels further, and it sits on a stabiliser bar so the cap has to level itself before it returns. How much slower depends entirely on your keyboard, which is the reason this page exists at all, separate from the main click speed test.

The interval budget: what a target rate actually demands

A rate is easier to think about as a gap. Ten presses per second is one press every 100 milliseconds, held a hundred times in a row over ten seconds. Written as a gap, a target stops being an abstraction and becomes a rhythm you can either hold or not.

The second half of the table is where the tactics live. If two thumbs alternate, each thumb only has to produce half the presses — so the interval each thumb must sustain is double the overall interval. That is not a trick; it is why alternating works, on a spacebar and on a mouse button alike. One caveat about reading it off the table: both gaps are rounded to the nearest millisecond independently, so on the rows where the division is not exact the printed per-thumb figure can sit a millisecond either side of double the printed overall gap — 12 presses per second prints 83 and 167, not 83 and 166. The underlying values are exactly double; the printed ones are rounded.

Timing and totals for each target rate. Overall gap is 1000 ÷ rate; the per-thumb figures halve the rate and double the gap for two hands alternating; press counts are rate × run length. Each gap is rounded to the nearest millisecond on its own, so a printed per-thumb figure can differ by 1 ms from double the printed overall gap. Computed by this site's code and asserted row by row in its test suite.
Target rate Gap between presses Per thumb (alternating) Gap per thumb Presses in 5 s Presses in 10 s
4 presses/s 250 ms 2 presses/s 500 ms 20 40
6 presses/s 167 ms 3 presses/s 333 ms 30 60
8 presses/s 125 ms 4 presses/s 250 ms 40 80
10 presses/s 100 ms 5 presses/s 200 ms 50 100
12 presses/s 83 ms 6 presses/s 167 ms 60 120
14 presses/s 71 ms 7 presses/s 143 ms 70 140

Look at the 10-presses-per-second row, where the arithmetic comes out whole. One thumb doing all the work has to complete a full press and release every 100 milliseconds — a tenth of a second, over and over. Split across two thumbs, each one gets 200 milliseconds, which is a pace most people can actually feel out. The rate did not change; the task did. This is the same arithmetic behind the two-finger mouse technique described on the main page, and it is the honest reason alternating methods produce higher numbers: they halve the work per digit, not the difficulty of clicking.

Choosing a length for a spacebar run

Everything about run length on the mouse test applies here. A one-second burst scores in whole numbers and tells you your ceiling; the ten-second run is the standard and averages out one fumbled press; a full minute stops measuring speed and starts measuring whether the key and your thumb both hold up. The selector above the pad switches between all eight lengths, and each keeps its own personal best — your ten-second spacebar record and your ten-second mouse record are stored separately and never overwrite each other.

One practical difference: a long spacebar run is much harder on the keyboard than on you. A hundred-second run at a modest six presses per second puts six hundred cycles through a single switch and its stabiliser, which is a reasonable way to find out whether a key that "feels fine" starts dropping presses when worked. If it does, the count will fall behind your thumb in the last third of the run.

When the spacebar is the thing you are testing

Plenty of people arrive here with a misbehaving space key and no interest in a score. The counter is a decent first check but a poor final answer, so it is worth being clear about what it can and cannot see.

  • It can show presses going missing: press deliberately thirty times, counting out loud, and compare with the counter. A count of 26 against 30 deliberate presses is a real finding.
  • It can show a positional dead zone. Run the same test three times hitting the left end, the centre and the right end of the bar. A spacebar that registers everything in the middle and half of it at one end has a stabiliser problem, not a switch problem.
  • It cannot show a key that fires twice from one press from the score alone, because a fast run and a doubling key look identical in an averaged rate. It can still catch one the same way as a missing press: count deliberate presses yourself and compare them against the counter, where 34 against 30 is as real a finding as 26. Reading it out of the events themselves needs the millisecond gaps between them, which the keyboard tester lists individually.
  • It cannot tell you anything about the other keys, or about how many keys your board can report simultaneously — a common cause of inputs vanishing during a game, and a separate measurement entirely.

And the usual caution applies at this length too: sustained fast pressing is something players widely report as tiring, and some report strain from it. That is what players report; it is not a medical finding and it is not advice — but a score on a web page is not worth a sore hand, so stop when something hurts.

Questions people ask

01 Why does holding the spacebar down only count once?
Because holding a key makes the operating system generate a stream of repeat events, and those are not presses — you pressed once. Every keyboard event carries a repeat flag that is true for exactly those generated events, and this test ignores them. So the bar has to come up before the next press can count, which is the same rule the mouse pad applies to a held button.
02 Why does the page not scroll while I hammer the space key?
Space normally scrolls a web page, so on this page the test cancels that default for every space keydown it sees — the whole time the tool is on screen, not just while a run is live, and before it decides whether the key event counts as a press. Both details matter: cancelling before the decision is what keeps a held bar from scrolling, since the auto-repeat events scroll the page just as well as real presses even though they are not counted. That is why the counter climbs while the page stays still. Typing into a text field is never captured, so the suppression cannot swallow your input anywhere it matters.
03 Is my spacebar rate supposed to be lower than my mouse rate?
For most people it is, and the reason is mechanical rather than muscular: a spacebar has a longer travel than a mouse switch and sits on a stabiliser bar, so the key has to physically return further before it can register again. Whether that difference is large or small depends entirely on your keyboard, which is a good reason to compare spacebar against spacebar and leave the mouse out of it.
04 Two thumbs feels faster. Is that cheating?
It is not cheating, it is arithmetic — and the table above shows exactly how much it helps. When two thumbs alternate, each one only has to produce half the presses, so the interval each thumb must sustain is doubled. Ten presses per second means one thumb every 200 ms instead of one thumb every 100 ms, which is a completely different physical task.
05 Does my spacebar score prove my keyboard is fine?
It proves the space key registered that many presses in that window. It does not test the rest of the board, does not show a key that fires twice from one press — not from the score alone, only by comparing the counter against presses you counted yourself — and does not measure how many keys your keyboard can report at once. Those are separate measurements — the keyboard tester covers all three.
06 Can I use this on a phone?
Yes, by tapping the pad — phones have no spacebar, so touch input drives the same counter through the same pointer event. Every finger you put down counts as a press, so alternating thumbs on a screen works exactly the way the alternation table describes.

Related tools we built

Keyboard Tester →

Check every key registers, measure rollover (how many keys your board reports at once) and catch a switch that double-fires.

If your movement keys drop out mid-fight, that is a rollover limit, not your click speed.

 Minecraft Circle Generator →

Pixel-accurate circle and ellipse templates for any block diameter, ready to copy row by row.

For the build side of the same game most people arrive here from.