Typewriter

The typewriter effect reveals text one character at a time at a steady rate, as if someone is typing it. It borrows the credibility of live input — the audience reads the text as something being made, not something being shown — which makes it the natural treatment for prompts, commands, and chat messages.

When to use it

Showing a prompt being entered, terminal commands, search queries, chat UI. Add a blinking caret and keep the rate steady — around 20–40 characters per second reads as confident typing.

Common mistakes

Using it for headlines (slow and precious); random per-character timing that reads as glitchy; forgetting the caret; typing so slowly the viewer finishes reading before the animation does.

How Impractical uses it

Typewriter is one of Impractical's named text entrances, used when a film shows the product being told what to do. Its version is deterministic — every render lands characters on exactly the same frames, so a cut is byte-identical across renders.