How can I see a visual overlay of shortcut keys I've pressed?

Question

I've seen several screencasts (recorded on Mac OS X) which show a nice little "toast" indicating which shortcut key is being pressed by the screencaster, typically in the middle of the screen. Is this a feature of the screencasting software? Is there an app that does this that stands alone?

I regularly do presentations for programming classes, and I want a way to show my audience what shortcuts I'm activating.

Answer 1

Screenflow has an option to display the pressed keys, but they will only be shown in the recorded screencast.

There are also standalone apps that display the keys in real time like Keycastr and Mouseposé.

Answer 2

At least on macOS Sierra, there is a way to natively show keys on-screen. However there are a couple limitations/things to be aware of:

• it piggybacks on the "Sticky Keys" accessibility setting, which changes the way modifier keys work (you just press them, and don't have to hold them)
• it will only show modifier keys; it won't show the final character (Ex: for CMD+P, it will only show CMD, and once you press "P" it disappears)

To enable this:

1. Go to System Preferences > Accessibility
2. In the categories along the left, select Keyboard
3. Select Enable Sticky Keys
4. Next to Enable Sticky Keys, click the Options... button
5. Select Display pressed keys on screen (and alternatively change where it appears). Click OK.

This fit my use case, and with Mouseposé at $9.99 (at the time of posting this) and KeyCastr crashing on startup for me, I thought I'd share. Hope this helps some people!

Answer 3

I’m recording lots of tutorials/screencasts too and was very unhappy with existing solutions for macOS (most of them seem broken or just ugly). So I’ve decided to make my own keystroke app:

Download: https://appahead.studio/apps/keystroke-pro/

Video: https://youtu.be/3koqaw99uKA (30 seconds)

Features:

• Animated keystrokes look gorgeous in light and dark
• Works great with macOS Mojave
• Individual-designed keys for common ISO and ANSI keyboard layouts
• Localized for 23 languages

Answer 4

KeyCastr has been taken over by new management and works perfectly well as of this writing (April 2021). There is a new release only a couple of months old. I'm typing with it on Big Sur...

Answer 5

Free, built-in solution on macOS Mojave:

System Preferences > Accessibility > Keyboard > Viewer > Enable Accessibility Keyboard

Answer 6

Although it looks like there's starting to be a lot of options, none of them fit what I wanted. Here's what I built: https://keylimepie.app

Here are the initial features, based on what I was looking for:

• A free option (the watermark removal is a small one time in-app-purchase)
• The ability to drag it to where I want
• "Key" views that look fine in light and dark mode
• Only show keyboard shortcuts by default, but optionally show all keystrokes (mainly to show modifier key presses)
• Holding the modifier keys keeps the shortcut on the screen as long as I want.
• Simplicity (I really just need to communicate shortcuts and don't care for much else)

The current version as of this writing is pretty barebones, and although simplicity is a priority, I do plan on adding more to it.

Answer 7

It may be a bit subte, or lacking in simplicity, but you can always open the built-in Keyboard Viewer app, and have that visible on screen during your screen recording - it will show whatever you're typing at the time, even when it's in the background.

Answer 8

I am using KeyDrawer for recording streams:

https://aquatious.com/keydrawer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhUG-hQY1cg)

The drawn keys look like native Macbook's/Magic keyboard keys, can be placed anywhere on your screen, scaled to whatever size you want without losing quality, etc:

Otherwise all recommended above apps I tried are very similar. If you're looking for a free alternative, I suppose there should be a better rendering plugin for keycastr, since the default one unfortunately looks far from perfect or perhaps someone should finally make one.