showkeys

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Simple application to display keystrokes during screencasts or presentations.

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Showkeys
--------

Showkeys is a simple program to display keys being pressed on the screen.

It is useful while making presentations and screencasts. The audience
will be able to see the keys being pressed.

It is similar to [key-mon](http://code.google.com/p/key-mon/). Key-mon
has more features than showkeys. The advantages of showkeys are

1. Doesn't use gtk/gnome.
2. Uses [libxosd](http://sourceforge.net/projects/libxosd/) to display
   keys directly onto the screen.
3. No floating windows that always need to be on top. This is very
   useful if you're using a tiling WM like Xmonad.
4. Keystroke history. key-mon has this but doesn't show
   modifiers. showkeys does this using an Emacs style key notation.

The list of things which key-mon does better than showkeys is far
longer but I wanted something that fixed these specific issues.

Requirements
------------

You will need

1. The Xlib development libraries. (available as `libx11-dev` on Debian). 
2. The libxosd development libraries (available as `libxosd-dev` on Debian).
3. The libXtst development libraries (available as `libxtst-dev` on Debian).
4. Your X server should have the [record](http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/libXtst/recordlib.html) extension enabled. You can check if this is enabled by running `xdpyinfo` and searching the list of extensions for `RECORD`. The command itself is part of the `x11-utils` package (alteast on Debian which I run).

Compiling
---------

1. Unzip the tarball.
2. Edit the file `config.h` configure showkeys.
3. Run `make showkeys`. It should create the executable.

This program uses some [Gnu extensions to libc](http://www.crasseux.com/books/ctutorial/asprintf.html) so might not work with a pure POSIX libc.

Bugs
----

The project is on Github. Please report bugs using the github issue tracker.

Contact
-------

You can find me @noufalibrahim on Twitter.

showkeys

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