If you are creating a video tutorial or giving a presentation, you may need to display your keyboard key press and mouse click activity to the viewers. To assist you, here are some free, portable utilities:
KeyPose – Shows Keystroke
KeyPose shows every keyboard key presses and shortcuts on the screen, on a semi-transparent overlay, as you type. If you don’t press any key for some milliseconds, the horizontal overlay is automatically hidden.
KeyPose works straight out of the box and has no settings option.
Download: KeyPose
ShowMouseClick – Shows Mouse click
ShowMouseClick is a tool that does exactly what its name says – show where you clicked on the screen, with a colored dot. Only left mouse clicks are displayed.
You can customize the dot color and its visibility duration after a click.
Download: ShowMouseClick
Tools to display Keystroke and Mouse click
ShowOff
ShowOff shows off every key stroke and mouse click on a white box in the top-left corner (default) of the screen. This box stays on top of all other windows and you can drag it anywhere on your screen.
ShowOff box is customizable – you can change its background color, size, transparency, and the content’s font color and font size.
ShowOff’s settings are stored in a INI file, which is saved in the same folder as the executable. If you find any key stroke is not recorded or if you don’t want to display any key, simply add/remove its entry from the INI file. Software should not be running while you are editing the file.
Download: ShowOff
OSD Hotkey
OSD Hotkey also shows keystroke and mouse click activities in a small window. The unique feature of this tool is that you can lock logging recording to a specific program, which means key press and mouse click performed only on the chosen program is shown on the screen. To activate this feature, first choose a program window by right-clicking on the software tray icon in the notification area, select “Set class for class control”, and left click on the program you want to show hotkeys for. Next, right-click on tray icon and click on “class control” from tray menu. To release the program, simply re-click on “class control”.
The display window is customizable. You can resize it, change transparency level, text background color and font color.
This program is written in AutoHotkey. You can download both the EXE and source code from the download page.
Download: OSD Hotkey