Key Cast

Mehul Singh Teya

Last update: Dec 23, 2022

Overview

Screen cast your keyboard and mouse clicks in style
Project Homepage »

View Demo · Report Bug · Request Feature

Table of Contents

Introduction Functionalities
- Built With
Getting Started Getting Started (Development)
Usage
License
Contact
Acknowledgement
Info
Issues

Introduction

In this internet age, everyone is learning to stay ahead in their career or to develop something new, creative and fun. Digging the internet for quality tutorials, watching that youtube videos of blender, illustrator, photoshop, webdev and what not. To give back to your community, you also thought of creating some tutorials, but guess what, you are not having any good keyboard and mouse indicators, and that ones which are available in the market, do not suits your personality.

Here comes Keycast, which enables you to, screen cast your keyboard and mouse clicks, while also being pleasant to your eyes and why you should consider Keycast, here's why:

Cross-platform: Run it anywhere. Run it on Linux, Windows or OS X.
Keybaord & mouse clicks: From keyboard presses to mouse clicks, we've covered you all!.
Drag it anywhere: Obstructing your view? place it anywhere on the screen.
[IN PROGRESS!] Show in style: Choose from numerous themes, or create your own.
[IN PROGRESS!] Transparency control: Adjust the transparency level of the panel as per your convenience.

Functionalities

Following are the functionalities implemented till now:
Show previous and current keypresses/key combinations
Show mouse activity
Drag and drop anywhere on the screen
Second instance prunning of the running application

Built With

This was achieved with Python (cPython), with Pynput as global keyboard and mouse event listener, Tkinter powering the GUI, & Pyinstaller for creating distributable package files.

Getting Started

You do not need Python installed to use this app, just go to the application Homepage, and download the package as per your OS.

For Linux/OS X users only

After downloading the file, open the properties of the file, go to permissions tab and check the option saying allow executing file as program, and then run the file, now it would run smoothly.

Getting Started (Development)

This section will help you to get started with the project, locally

Prerequistes

You should be having Python version > 3.6.x
Install the requirements from REQUIREMENTS.txt file via pip before actually running the application, with

    pip3 install -r REQUIREMENTS.txt

Installation

Clone the project locally with

    git clone [email protected]:daxter-army/key-cast.git

Navigate to the project dir and activate virtual env
for windows

    .\keycast_env\bin\activate

for linux/OS X

    source .\keycast_env\bin\activate

Now you'll see that virtual env has been activated, after this hit

    python3 keycast_dev.py

You have done it, you will be seeing a window running on your screen, if everything goes well.

Building

To create one distributable file on linux/OS X, type

    pyinstaller keycast_prod.py --onefile -i "path_to_icon/icon_file.ico" --add-data "assets:assets"

With hidden console window, in Windows, type

    pyinstaller keycast_prod.py --onefile -i "path_to_icon/icon_file.ico" --add-data "assets:assets" --windowed

With console window in the background, in Windows, remove --windowed argument

Usage

You can use it with any of your favourite software while making any tutorial, screen casting your screen, or while streaming your game over the internet.

More themes coming soon!

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

Contact

Mehul Singh Teya - [email protected] | LinkedIn
Project Link: https://github.com/daxter-army/key-cast
Project Homepage : https://daxter-army.github.io/key-cast

Acknowledgement

Info

Right now it is heavily under development, and is being developed in linux (ubuntu). You can see unidentified characters being shown by the software, because sometimes different key combos having different key codes, I am working on this to support as many as keyboards and key combos possible.
windows_bundle directory contains bundled package for windows, same is the case with linux_bundle, bundle to be created for mac OS X.
The main file that runs is /dist/keycast_prod.exe, these are also the files that are available on the homepage to be downloaded.
For development use, keycast_dev.py, then copy-paste the whole code to keycast_prod.py, and also paste the code of additional files in that file also, to increase the performance.