=====================
Screencast your keys.
=====================

.. contents::

A screencast tool to display your keys, inspired by Screenflick_.

screenkey_ 0.9 was an almost-complete rewrite of screenkey_ 0.2, featuring:

- Several keyboard translation methods
- Key composition/input method support
- Configurable font/size/position
- Highlighting of recent keystrokes
- Improved backspace processing
- Normal/Emacs/Mac caps modes
- Multi-monitor support
- Dynamic recording control
- Switch for visible shift and modifier sequences only
- Repeats compression
- Countless bug fixes

Now, screenkey_ 0.10 is a rewrite of the previous, which drops pygtk
and uses PyGobjet, (Python3 & Gtk+ 3).

Installation and basic usage
----------------------------

Execute without installation::

  ./screenkey

To install::

  sudo ./setup.py install

Dependencies:

- Python 3
- python3-gi
- setuptools (build only)
- DistUtils-Extra (build only)
- slop (https://github.com/naelstrof/slop)
- FontAwesome_ (for multimedia symbols)
- Python AppIndicator (required for Unity / GNOME Shell)

Install dependencies (on Debian/Ubuntu)::

  sudo apt-get install python3-gi python-setuptools python-distutils-extra

You can also install "screenkey" via ArchLinux's AUR package:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/screenkey


Settings
--------

Display time:
  Persistence (in seconds) of the output window after typing has stopped.
  Defaults to 2.5 seconds. When the window is persistent, display time still
  controls the time before the text is cleared.

Persistent window:
  Forces the output window to be always visible, irregardless of typing
  activity. Mostly useful for interactive window placement and/or "fixed"
  positioning.

Screen:
  Physical screen/monitor used for the output window.

Position:
  Position of the output window. The position is normally relative to the
  chosen screen. If a window has been selected with "Select window/region", the
  position becomes relative to the window. If "fixed" is chosen, the output
  window's position and size are specified explicitly. See `Interactive
  placement`_ for more details.

Font:
  Font used for the output window. A scalable font and wide Unicode coverage is
  required (the DejaVu family is *highly* recommended).

Size:
  Size of the font used in the output window. Chooses proportionally between
  8/12/24% of the screen size. When "fixed" positioning is used, size is
  ignored and the font will fill the available height of the output window.

Keyboard mode:
  Choose the translation method of keyboard events.

  "Composed" attempts to show only the final results of key composition. Dead
  keys and any intermediate output during composition is not shown. Currently
  works correctly with XIM/IBUS, but only for on-the-spot editing. It can cause
  problems with complex input methods (support for wider compatibility is
  underway).

  "Translated" shows the result of each keypress on the keyboard, accounting
  for the current keyboard locale and modifiers, but not composition. Pressing
  a dead key followed by a letter will show both keys.

  "Raw" shows which key caps were pressed on the keyboard, without translation.
  For example, typing "!" (which is often located on top of the key "1")
  requires pressing "Shift+1", which is what this output mode shows. "Backspace
  mode", "Always visible Shift" and "Modifiers only" have no effect in this
  mode.

  "Keysyms" shows the keysyms ("symbolic" names) of each pressed key as
  received by the server. Mostly useful for debugging.

Backspace mode:
  Controls the effect of "backspace" on the text in the output window.

  "Normal" always inserts a backspace symbol in the output window.

  "Baked" simulates the effect of backspace in the text only if the last
  keypress is a regular letter and no caret movement has been detected. In any
  other case, a backspace symbol is inserted instead.

  "Full" is similar to "baked", but will eat through several other, less safe
  keys, such as tabs and returns.

Modifiers mode:
  Select how modifiers keys (such as Control, Alt) are displayed in the output
  window. "Normal" uses traditional PC names (Ctrl+A) while "Mac" uses Mac
  symbols directly (⌘+A). The "Emacs" mode will display Emacs-style shortened
  keyboard sequences (C-A).

Show Modifier sequences only:
  Only show modifier/control sequences in the output window.
  Bare, shifted or translated letters are not shown.

Always show Shift:
  Shift is normally hidden when the control sequence includes a letter that can
  differentiate between a shifted/non-shifted key. For example, Shift +
  "Control+a" is normally shown just as "Control+A" (notice the capital "A").

  When "Always show Shift" is used, Shift is always included in modifier
  sequences, if pressed. Has no effect when using the "Emacs" modifiers mode.

Show Whitespace characters:
  Convert regular whitespace characters (tabs and spaces) to a visible
  representation instead of showing a blank. Newlines are also hidden when
  unambiguous in multiline mode.

Compress repeats:
  When enabled, contiguous repeated sequences are truncated after the requested
  threshold. A counter of total occurrences is shown instead, which is
  generally more legible.


Advanced usage
--------------

Controlling visibility
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

To disable screenkey while recording (for example, during password prompts),
press both control keys, or both shift keys, or both alt keys at the same time.

Press the same combination again to resume it.

This has the same effect of toggling the state from the system tray icon, but
it's completely stealth: there's no feedback that screenkey is being switched
on/off.

If you need the viewer to focus on a sentence you just typed, you can press a
silent modifier (such as Shift, or Control) to keep the output window visible a
little longer without prolonging the default timeout.


Interactive placement
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

screenkey is normally positioned on the top/center/bottom part of the screen.

If you're recording a screencast only for a specific application, you can click
on "Select window/region" to select on which window the output should be
overlaid (slop_ must be installed for this task). When a window has been
selected, top/center/bottom refer to the window's contents. Press "Reset" to
restore the original behavior.

When "fixed" is chosen, the position of the output is specified *directly*. The
cursor turns immediately into a crossbar: drag over the desired screen region
(where the text should appear), or press "Esc" to abort. Again, press "Reset"
to restore the original behavior.


Command-line placement
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The "geometry" argument follows the standard X11 geometry format
(``WxH[+X+Y]``) and can be provided by slop_, which allows to select windows
and/or drag over the desired region interactively without the need of
calculating the coordinates manually.

When a geometry argument has been provided, the position (top/middle/bottom)
becomes relative to the selected rectangle. For example, to overlay screenkey
on top of an existing window, you can simply do::

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

To set the actual text rectangle instead, use "fixed" positioning. Using slop,
you can combine both and simply drag the desired rectangle during selection::

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


Choosing a good font
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The default font is "Sans Bold", which is usually mapped to "DejaVu Sans" on
most Linux installations (look for the ``ttf-dejavu`` package). 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).


Multimedia keys
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"screenkey" supports several multimedia keys. To display them with symbols
instead of text abbreviations, FontAwesome_ needs to be installed.

On Debian/Ubuntu, the font is available in the ``fonts-font-awesome`` package. On
Arch Linux the package is instead ``ttf-font-awesome``.

.. _FontAwesome: http://fontawesome.io/


Tiling window managers
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"screenkey" should work correctly by default with any tiling window manager.

The original version of screenkey used to require customization for the output
window to work/float correctly. These settings are *no longer required* with
this fork, and can be safely removed.

If you don't have a system tray, you can either configure screenkey 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, but "xcompmgr" also
works correctly without any additional configuration.


Related tools
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you're recording a screencast where almost all editing is already visible
(for example, in ``vi`` or most other text editors), consider using a bigger
screen font instead, so that the viewer can read the text directly while the
program is being used.

If the control sequences you're typing are rare, you might even want to spell
what you're doing instead of obscuring the screen with the typing output.

When doing screencasts involving a lot of mouse activity, or which require
holding down modifiers to perform other mouse actions, key-mon_ might be a good
companion to screenkey, or replace it entirely.

key-mon can be configured to show the state of key modifiers continuously and
circle the location of mouse clicks ("visible click"). key-mon and screenkey
complete each-other and can be used at the same time.


Authors and Copyright
---------------------

"screenkey" can be found at https://www.thregr.org/~wavexx/software/screenkey/

| "screenkey" is distributed under GNU GPLv3+, WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.
| Copyright(c) 2010-2012: Pablo Seminario <pabluk@gmail.com>
| Copyright(c) 2015-2016: wave++ "Yuri D'Elia" <wavexx@thregr.org>.
| Copyright(c) 2019:      Georges Khaznadar <georgesk@debian.org>

screenkey's GIT repository is publicly accessible at:

https://salsa.debian.org/georgesk/screenkey


Additional Thanks
-----------------

* Benjamin Chrétien
* Dmitry Bushev
* Doug Patti
* Igor Bronovskyi
* Ivan Makfinsky
* Jacob Gardner
* Muneeb Shaikh
* Stanislav Seletskiy
* farrer (launchpad)
* zhum (launchpad)
* 伊冲


.. _Screenflick: http://www.araelium.com/screenflick/
.. _key-mon: https://code.google.com/p/key-mon/
.. _screenkey: https://launchpad.net/screenkey
.. _slop: https://github.com/naelstrof/slop
