shoki

Display key presses in a small window on your desktop as you type.

Overview

Shoki is Windows only program that displays key presses in an overlapped tool window. This allows one to interact with another program and show their keystrokes. Typically, this is when one is demostrating their usage of a text editor or similiar program.

Building

Download this repo and open a command shell capable of calling the Visual C++ or MinGW GCC compiler. If you have Visual Studio installed you may want to open Visual Studio Command Line Tools prompt that calls the appropriate vsvarsall.bat script and loads the appropriate variables into the shell.

With a proper environment setup navigate to this repo's directory and call either build-msvc.bat or build-gcc.bat depending on which compiler you want to use. Either build script will create a build directory and place the shoki.exe binary there. The binary has no dependencies and can be placed and run from anywhere.

Usage

When loading the application shoki begins in preview mode. This displays a small traditional window with a transparent preview area that allows you to move and position the application. Once shoki is in place switch it to display mode by pressing CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + F6. In display mode the window border and its controls will become transparent and the black rectangle displaying key strokes will become visible as you type and fade away during keyboard inactivity. To switch back to preview press CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + F6 again.

Known Issues

• Shoki currently only supports keys found on U.S. keyboards. Since I wrote this program for me to display another program I wrote, I haven't invested the time to support other non English characters. This feature is definitely possible but not something I plan on doing any time soon (or at all).

• In preview mode the black rectangle displaying key strokes in transparent area of shoki will have a noticeable flicker as it fades away. This is due the interaction of mixing the transparency of GDI+ with the traditional transparency of Windows GDI. Shoki does not exhibit this behavior in display mode and since that is the intended mode of operation I don't plan on spending any effort addressing this issue.

• In some cases the modifiers are not recognized when pressing it rapidly in succession with another key. For example, quickly typing SHIFT + v may show 'v' instead of 'V' like it is supposed to. In fact, my text editor would pick up the correct key combination and display a 'V'. I tried to address this issue with different methods provided by the Win32 API, such as GetAsyncKeyState to capture when modifier keys are pressed, but didn't have much luck. Currently, the work around is just to be more deliberate with your key strokes and type a tad slower.

TODO

TODO.org displays a list of things that I would consider be useful. Most of these are adding the appropriate Win32 widgets to the preview mode window to allow customization. I haven't been hard pressed for these features since I'm the only known user of shoki and if I want something changed I just the change the source code and recompile.

License

GPL Version 3