A screencast tool to display your keys; forked from screenkey 0.2, inspired by Screenflick and initially based on key-mon.

• Multi-monitor support
• Configurable font/size/position
• Can show modifier sequences only
• Highlight recent keypresses
• Improved backspace processing (3 different modes)
• Normal/Emacs/Mac caps modes
• Enable/disable dynamically by pressing both control keys
• All settings available through command-line flags
• Usable without system tray (for tiling window managers)
• Several bug fixes

Execute without installation:

./screenkey

To install:

sudo ./setup.py install

Dependencies:

• Python 2.7 (Python 3 support yet incomplete)
• PyGTK
• Python Xlib
• setuptools (build only)
• DistUtils-Extra (build only)

Install dependencies (on Debian/Ubuntu):

sudo apt-get install python-gtk2 python-setuptools python-distutils-extra

Overlay on top of an existing window, interactive selection using slop:

./screenkey -g $(slop -n -f '%g')

Set actual text rectangle interactively (drag during selection):

./screenkey -p fixed -g $(slop -n -f '%g')

Record an Emacs screencast:

./screenkey --mods-mode emacs -s small -g $(slop -n -f '%g')

Persistent window:

./screenkey --persist

Press both control keys during a recording to disable screenkey (for example, during password prompts). Press both again to resume it.

The default font is "Sans Bold", which is usually mapped to "DejaVu Sans" on most Linux installations. It's a good all-around font which provides all the required glyphs and has excellent readability.

For screencasts about programming, we recommend "DejaVu Sans Mono Bold" instead, which provides better differentiation among similar letterforms (0/O, I/l, etc).

"screenkey" should work correctly by default with tiling window managers.

If you don't have a system tray, you can either configure it through command line flags or use --show-settings to test the configuration interactively.

To get transparency you need a compositor to be running (for example, "compton" or "unagi" are popular for their low impact on performance).

"screenkey" can be found at https://github.com/wavexx/screenkey

• Doug Patti
• Ivan Makfinsky
• Jacob Gardner
• Muneeb Shaikh
• farrer (launchpad)
• zhum (launchpad)