What's your coding APM?

Actions Per Minute (APM) is used to describe how fast a player is at multitasking in a real time strategy game. Korean StarCraft pro-gamers have APMs close to 400 (or around 6 actions per second).

Have you wondered how fast your APM is while coding, writing or photoshopping? No? Well, neither had I until last night!

After a hacking session in XCode and Objective C I was able to create a neat Mac OS application that displays your current APM in the menu bar. It looks like this:

Some of my current stats:

• Writing this blog post: 100 APM
• Browsing and editing code in VIM: 250 APM
• SSHing via the terminal: 150 APM
• Reading Hacker News or blog posts: 100 APM (it should be noted that I highlight text while I read stuff...)

Is APM important? I doubt it. But it's fun to see how fast you are at different tasks. And I am glad that my VIM skills are comparable to a Korean's pro-gamer StarCraft skills... ;-)

Want to find out what your APM is?

• Download iAPM (requires Mac OS X 10.5+)

Want to improve iAPM? Fork the source code and submit patches to:

• http://github.com/amix/iAPM

How iAPM works

iAPM attaches an event handler that listens for actions performed by an user. It then basically counts these actions and displays two values:

• `apm_60 (apm_1)`
  where apm_60 is APM based on a 60 second counter and apm_1 is based on a 1 second counter
• It listens to these events: kCGEventLeftMouseDown, kCGEventRightMouseDown, kCGEventKeyDown, kCGEventScrollWheel, kCGEventOtherMouseDown

Known issues

• Mouse movement isn't registered
• Using the scrolling wheel increases the APM a lot

Would love to hear about your APMs :-)